* It is hoped that the following memoir, as it relates to Lord Byron, may not be deemed misplaced here.

were no elements of earth, fire, or water: but before he left school he nearly lost his life by being blown up in one of his experiments, and gave up the pursuit. He now turned his mind to metaphysics, and became infected with the materialism of the French school. Even before he was sent to University College, Oxford, he had entered into an epistolary theological controversy with a dignitary of the Church, under the feigned name of a woman; and, after the second term, he printed a pamphlet with a most extravagant title, ‘The Necessity of Atheism.’ This silly work, which was only a recapitulation of some of the arguments of Voltaire and the philosophers of the day, he had the madness to circulate among the bench of Bishops, not even disguising his name. The consequence was an obvious one:—he was summoned before the heads of the College, and, refusing to retract his opinions, on the contrary preparing to argue them with the examining Masters, was expelled the University. This disgrace in itself affected Shelley but little at the time, but was fatal to all his hopes of happiness and prospects in life; for it deprived him of his first love, and was the eventual means of alienating him for ever from his family. For some weeks after this expulsion his father refused to receive him under his roof; and when he did, treated him with such marked coldness, that he soon quitted what he no longer considered his home, went to London privately, and

thence eloped to Gretna Green with a Miss Westbrook,—their united ages amounting to thirty-three. This last act exasperated his father to such a degree, that he now broke off all communication with Shelley. After some stay in Edinburgh, we trace him into Ireland; and, that country being in a disturbed state, find him publishing a pamphlet, which had a great sale, and the object of which was to soothe the minds of the people, telling them that moderate firmness, and not open rebellion, would most tend to conciliate, and to give them their liberties.

and mine differ materially upon the metaphysical portion of that work; though, in common with all who are not blinded by baseness and bigotry, I highly admire the poetry of that and his other productions.” It is to be remarked here, that ‘Queen Mab’ eight or ten years afterwards fell into the hands of a knavish bookseller, who published it on his own account; and on its publication and subsequent prosecution Shelley disclaimed the opinions contained in that work, as being the crude notions of his youth.

Euganean Hills, marked with great pathos and beauty. His first visit to Italy was short, for he was soon called to England by his wife’s melancholy fate, which ever after threw a cloud over his own. The year subsequent to this event he married Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin, daughter of the celebrated Mary Wolstonecraft and Godwin; and shortly before this period, heir to an income of many thousands a-year and a baronetage, he was in such pecuniary distress that he was nearly dying of hunger in the streets! Finding, soon after his coming of age, that he was entitled to some reversionary property in fee, he sold it to his father for an annuity of 1000l. a-year, and took a house at Marlow, where he persevered more than ever in his poetical and classical studies. It was during his residence in Buckinghamshire that he wrote his ‘Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude;’ perhaps one of the most perfect specimens of harmony in blank verse that our language possesses, and full of the wild scenes which his imagination had treasured up in his Alpine excursions. In this poem he deifies Nature much in the same way that Wordsworth did in his earlier productions.

by the Lord Chancellor, on the ground of his Atheism. He again crossed the Alps, and took up his residence at Venice. There he strengthened his intimacy with Lord Byron, and wrote his ‘Revolt of Islam,’ an allegorical poem in the Spenser stanza. Noticed very favourably in Blackwood’s Magazine, it fell under the lash of ‘The Quarterly,’ which indulged itself in much personal abuse of the author, both openly in the review of that work, and insidiously under the critique of Hunt’s ‘Foliage.’ Perhaps little can be said for the philosophy of ‘The Loves of Laon and Cythra.’ Like Mr. Owen of Lanark, he believed in the perfectibility of human nature, and looked forward to a period when a new golden age would return to earth,—when all the different creeds and systems of the world would be amalgamated into one,—crime disappear,—and man, freed from shackles civil and religious, bow before the throne “of his own aweless soul,” or “of the Power unknown.”

attempt to revive a lost play of Æschylus. This drama shews an acquaintance with the Greek tragedy-writers which perhaps no other person possessed in an equal degree, and was written at Rome amid the flower-covered ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. At Rome also he formed the story of ‘The Cenci’ into a tragedy, which, but for the harrowing nature of the subject, and the prejudice against any thing bearing his name, could not have failed to have had the greatest success,—if riot on the stage, at least in the closet. Lord Byron was of opinion that it was the best play the age had produced, and not unworthy of the immediate followers of Shakspeare.

Discouraged by the ill success of his writings—persecuted by the malice of his enemies—hated by the world, an outcast from his family, and a martyr to a painful complaint,—he was subject to occasional fits of melancholy and dejection. For the last four years, though he continued to write, he had given up publishing. There were two occasions, however, that induced him to break through his resolution. His ardent love of liberty inspired him to write ‘Hellas, or the Triumph of Greece,’ a drama, since translated into Greek, and which he inscribed to his friend Prince Maurocordato; and his attachment to Keats led him to publish an elegy, which he entitled ‘Adonais.’

This last is perhaps the most perfect of all his compositions, and the one he himself considered so. Among the mourners at the funeral of his poet-friend he draws this portrait of himself; (the stanzas were afterwards expunged from the Elegy:)

“’Mid others of less note came one frail form,— A phantom among men,—companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm, Whose thunder is its knell. He, as I guess, Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness

The last eighteen months of Shelley’s life were passed in daily intercourse with Lord Byron, to whom the amiability, gentleness, and elegance of his manners, and his great talents and acquirements, had endeared him. Like his friend, he wished to die young: he perished in the twenty-ninth year of his age, in the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Lerici, from the upsetting of an open boat. The sea had been to him,

as well as Lord Byron, ever the greatest delight; and as early as 1813, in the following lines written at sixteen, he seems to have anticipated that it would prove his grave.

“To-morrow comes: Cloud upon cloud with dark and deep’ning mass Roll o’er the blacken’d waters; the deep roar Of distant thunder mutters awfully: Tempest unfolds its pinions o’er the gloom That shrouds the boiling surge; the pitiless fiend With all his winds and lightnings tracks his prey; The torn deep yawns,—the vessel finds a grave Beneath its jagged jaws.”