Page:Shelley, a poem, with other writings (Thomson, Debell).djvu/59

Rh he whom they worshipped in secret is no longer execrated or contemned by their people, but is actually advanced to a lofty place in the national Pantheon; that it is no longer a distinction good or bad to burn incense at his shrine.

The simple facts that he has been chosen as one of the earliest subjects in a Series whose avowed chief end is popularity, and that already, as we write, the Monograph on him is advertised as in its sixth thousand, prove how enormously he has risen in public interest and estimation during this second half of our century. We have ample corroboration of this in the two critical editions of his Poems, with elaborate Memoir, by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, in that of Mr. H. B. Forman, in the cheap reprint of Poems and Prose Works by Mr. R. H. Shepherd, in the various recent popular editions and selections of his Poems; in the numerous articles on him, biographical and critical, among which we may specify those by Mr. R. Garnett, the late T. L. Peacock (to whom so many of Shelley's best letters from Italy were addressed), Miss Mathilde Blind, Prof. T. Spencer Bayne, and Mr. Swinburne; and in such works as Trelawny's "Records" (the new enlarged edition of the "Recollections"), Robert Browning's Introduction to the Pseudo-Letters (and his superb "Memorabilia" in "Men and Women"), Mr Garnett's "Relics," Lady Shelley's "Memorials," and the late Mr. D. F. M'Carthy's "Early Life."

Yet, notwithstanding all the Shelley literature thus glanced at, a clear place was left, and a distinct need existed, for such a popular booklet as the present, treating comprehensively, though succinctly, the life and work of the poet. Rossetti's "Memoir," as yet the