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LONDON:

PRINTED BY G. LILLEY, 148, HOLBORN BARS.

PREFACE.

TWENTY-FOUR years have elapsed since Shelley was withdrawn from the world, and no "record " of him "remains," save a few fugitive notices scattered about in periodicals. The Notes, it is true, appended to the last edition of his works, are highly valuable, and full of eloquence and feeling, but they relate rather to the "origin and history" of those works, than of the poet, and date only from 1814; leaving his life up to that period a blank, that imperatively requires to be filled up.

Mrs. Shelley, in January, 1839, says, "this is not the time to tell the truth, and I should

reject any colouring of the truth," and adds, that "the errors of action committed by a man as noble and generous as Shelley, may, as far only as he is concerned, be fearlessly avowed by those who loved him, in the firm conviction, that were they judged impartially, his character would stand fairer and brighter than that of any of his contemporaries."

The long interval which has transpired since the writing of this passage, makes me conclude that the amiable and gifted person who penned it, has abandoned, if she had ever formed, the intention of executing this "labour of love;" and the more so, as in 1824, she points out Leigh Hunt as "the person best calculated for such an undertaking.”

"The distinguished friendship that Shelley felt for him, and the enthusiastic affection with which he clings to the memory of his friend," no doubt well qualified him, on those two grounds, for Shelley's biographer; but he doubtless felt that an acquaintance of nine or ten years, most

of which were passed by Shelley abroad, furnished him with very inadequate materials.

Sensible how much more fitted he would have been to have performed this office than myself, I should have been happy to have supplied him with data absolutely requisite for tracing Shelley's genius from its first germs up to its maturity, and forming an impartial judgment of his character-data which no one but myself could have supplied, inasmuch as I knew him from childhood—as, we were at school together, continually together during the vacations, corresponded regularly, and although I lost sight of him for a few years when in the East, because our intimacy was renewed on my return; and, more than all, because I passed the two last winters and springs of his existence, one under his roof, and the other with him, without the interruption of a single day.

It may be objected that these memorabilia are imperfect, from the almost total want of letters. Unhappily all those-and they would have formed

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