Of our sad fate with gentleness, as now: Thou bearest us; and to the faith that I, Tho' wrapt in a strange cloud of crime and shame, 145 Ill tongues shall wound me, and our common name 150 For men to point at as they pass, do thou BERNARDO. I cannot say, farewell! CAMILLO. 155 O, Lady Beatrice! BEATRICE. Give yourself no unnecessary pain, My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, Mother, tie 160 In any simple knot; aye, that does well. And yours I see is coming down. How often Well, 'tis very well. 165 THE END [OF THE CENCI.] [Shelley's note on the Niobe, at Florence, first published in The Athenæum for the 15th of September 1832, has passages which are highly suggestive of the majestic pathos of the close of The Cenci. Not only does he strike the key-note of his own last scene when he says of the Niobe that "It seems as if despair and beauty had combined and produced nothing but the sublime loveliness of grief"; but in Beatrice's last utterance to her mother we have the same tender thought that he uses in criticism on the group of Niobe and her daughter: "The child is clothed in a thin tunic of delicatest woof, and her hair is gathered on her head into a knot, probably by that mother whose care will never gather it again."—H. B. F.] [It would seem that a considerable portion of Prometheus Unbound was written in 1818. In an undated letter to Mrs. Shelley written from Padua to her at Este, apparently in September of that year, Shelley asks her to "bring the sheets" of that poem, which she "will find numbered from one to twenty-six on the table of the pavilion"; and in a letter to Peacock dated "Este, October 8, 1818," he says, "I have been writing-and indeed have just finished the first act of a lyric and classical drama, to be called Prometheus Unbound." According to Mrs. Shelley he had meditated upon the subject, and written portions during his Italian travels between the final departure from England in the Spring of 1818 and the settlement at Rome in March, 1819, and only in the Spring of 1819 began to give his undivided attention to it. Then, at all events, in the Baths of Caracalla, the first three acts were completed, before The Cenci was composed he mentions Prometheus as "just finished"-in a letter to Peacock dated 6 April, 1819,-wherein he says, "I think the execution is better than any of my former attempts.' This letter, of course, refers to the three acts only; for, as Mrs. Shelley says in her note on Prometheus, "it was not till several months after, when at Florence, that he conceived a fourth act... ought to be added"; and this was not finished till near the end of December, 1819. In a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne, dated "Pisa, May 26th, 1820," in accepting an offer made by them to correct the proof-sheets, he adds, "I enclose you two little papers of corrections and additions,—I do not think you will find any difficulty in interpolating them into their proper places." But on July 12th, 1820, he writes to Peacock (Fraser's Magazine, March 1860, p. 313), "I make bold to write to you on the news that you are correcting my Prometheus, for which I return thanks." The Poem was published, with nine smaller poems (see title-page and contents, reproduced opposite), about August 1820, in an octavo volume, consisting of fly-title Prometheus Unbound &c &c, title, contents, preface pp. VII to XV, fly-title Prometheus Unbound with dramatis persona, and text pp. 19 to 222, including the fly-title Miscellaneous Poems. The first fly-title has on the back advertisements of The Cenci, The Revolt of Islam, Rosalind and Helen &c., and Alastor, and an imprint, "Marchant, Printer, Ingram-Court, Fenchurch-Street, London." The contents is usually a “cancel-leaf." There are two pages of Ollier's miscellaneous advertisements at the end of the book, including one of the Six Weeks' Tour, and ending with three announcements of forthcoming works, the last of which, anonymous, is "JULIAN and MADDALO, and other Poems." In a letter to Mr. Ollier dated "Pisa, November 10th, 1820," Shelley says of Prometheus &c. "It is to be regretted that the errors of the press are so numerous, and in many respects so destructive of the sense of a species of poetry which, I fear, even without this disadvantage, few will understand or like. I shall send you the list of errata in a day or two." He does not seem to have sent it till the 20th of January 1821,-in a letter printed in the Shelley Memorials, but there misplaced and dated 1820: he refers to it as "a formidable list." Mrs. Shelley seems to have recovered it from Mr. Ollier, as she says in the note on Prometheus, in her first collected edition, "the verbal alterations in this edition of Prometheus are made from a list of errata, written by Shelley himself." This we must understand with a reservation to allow for errors of the press in her own edition. In Shelley's edition the names of the speakers are sometimes given in full, at others abbreviated, sometimes placed over the centre of the speech, at others at the beginning of the first line here, as in The Cenci, I have followed Mrs. Shelley in giving every name in full over the centre of the speech. A great part of the MS. of Prometheus, carefully written, is in the possession of Sir Percy Shelley; and an account of some of the variations'shewn by it was given in The Westminster Review for July, 1870.-H. B. F.] |