the Portuguese service, whose name I have now forgotten. He had, however, started without delay for Genoa, whither Mr. Tighe and Shelley followed, but without being able to overtake him, or learn his route from that city.

This anecdote may suggest to the reader the fanaticism which nearly proved fatal to Spinosa, who has been branded everywhere but in Germany as an Atheist and Epicurean, but whom Novates calls a god-intoxicated man, and whose epicureanism is best disproved by his spending only twopence halfpenny a day on his food.

One evening as Spinosa was coming out of the theatre, where he had been relaxing his overtasked mind, he was startled by the fierce expression of a dark face thrust eagerly before his. The glare of blood-thirsty fanaticism arrested him; a knife gleamed in the air, and he had barely time to parry the blow. It fell upon his chest, but fortunately deadened in its force, only tore his coat. The assassin escaped-Spinosa walked home thoughtful.

The author of the Biography of Philosophy, one of the most acute and candid works I ever met with, compares Shelley and Spinosa together, and does ample justice to their characters. Speaking of Shelley's ostracism, he says,

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Like the young and energetic Shelley, who afterwards imitated him, he found himself an outcast in the busy world, with no other guides through its perplexing labyrinths than sincerity and self-dependence. Two or three new friends soon presented themselves, men who warred against their religion, as he had warred against his own; and a bond of sympathy was forged out of the common injustice. Here again we trace a resemblance to Shelley, who, discountenanced by his relations, sought among a few sceptical friends, to supply the affection he was thus deprived of. Like Spinosa, he too had only sisters with whom he had been brought up. No doubt, in both cases, the consciousness of sincerity, and the pride of martyrdom, were great shields in the combat with society. They are

always so, and it is well they are so, or the battle would never be fought; but they never entirely replace the affections. Shut from our family, we may seek a brotherhood of apostacy, but the new and precarious intellectual sympathies are no compensations for the loss of the emotive sympathies, with all the links of association and all the memories of childhood. Spinosa must have felt this, and as Shelley in a rash marriage endeavoured to fill up the void of his yearning heart, so Spinosa must, we think, swayed by the same feeling, have sought the daughter of his friend and master, Vander Ende, as his wife.”

This anecdote (to return to it) will show what animosity the malice of Shelley's enemies had roused against him in the hearts of his compatriots; but the time is happily past, when Quarterlies can deal forth damnation, and point out as a mad dog, to be knocked on the head, every one who does not subscribe to the Thirtynine Articles.

During this winter, he translated to me the Prometheus of schylus, reading it as fluently as if written in French or Italian; and if there be any merit in my own version of that wonderful drama, it is much due to the recollection of his words, which often flowed on line after line in blank verse, into which very harmonious prose resolves itself naturally. His friends, the Gisbornes, had, two summers before, taught him also Spanish, which I had studied in India from a Spanish Gil Blas, pretended to be the original— Le Sage's the copy; and we luxuriated in what Shelley calls "the golden and starry Autos," or Mysteries, except the Greek Choruses, perhaps among the most difficult poems to comprehendand very rare; so much so, that they are scarcely to be obtained in Spain, though found by Shelley accidentally in an old book-stall at Leghorn. It may be well said, that every new language is a new sense; Shelley profited much by his mastery of Calderon. The splendid passage (truly Salvator-Rosesque,) descriptive of the Pass lead

ing to Petrella, is almost a version from the Auto of El Purgatorio di San Patricio; and Shelley. has left some scenes of Cyprian that give the original in all its spirit. But we also read a tragedy of Calderon's, which, though it cannot compete with Shakspeare's Henry the VIII. contains more poetry—the Cisma D'Ingalaterra. Shelley was much struck with the characteristic Fool, who plays a part in it, and deals in fables, but more so with the octave stanzas (a strange metre in a drama, to choose,) spoken by Carlos, Enamorado di Anna Bolena, whom he had met at Paris, during her father's embassy. So much did Shelley admire these stanzas, that he copied them out into one of his letters to Mrs. Gisborne, of the two last of which I append a translation, marking in Italics, the lines corrected by Shelley:

Hast thou not seen, officious with delight,

Move through the illumined air about the flower, The Bee, that fears to drink its purple light,

Lest danger lurk within that Rose's bower?