Page:Shelley, a poem, with other writings (Thomson, Debell).djvu/92

74 whence their drudgery has been the opposite of divine, and a great poet shouts with infinite contempt to these "critics as sweep out his chimbley" and complain of the quantity of soot in his flue:—

While of those more humble and earnest and piously diligent, many have been so intolerably dull, have been instinct with such a fatal prosaic or inverse alchemy, turning gold into lead, that we can only picture them following their liege lords as Heine pictures poor Franz Horn plodding painfully for ever on his donkey after Shakespere flying at ease on his noble charger.

But our recent editors and scholiasts have been usually of a higher type—more modest and courteous and fair one to another, more loyal and reverent to their common master, more intelligent and sympathetic; while the great general progress in absolute, and especially in comparative, criticism has put at their command an apparatus much more powerful and precise than was ever constructed before. It would indeed be well could we dispense with their services altogether—and they themselves are the first to acknowledge this; but in many cases such service is simply indispensable, and in none among our modern poets more conspicuously than in that of Shelley. All who take any interest in the subject know in what untoward circumstances the mass of his mature compositions were first printed, during his residence in Italy or after his sudden death. The pirated editions were very corrupt; those of Mrs. Shelley very