So strongly held to his last hour was Shelley by the thought which came to him, through the scrap of dirty paper taken with worthless stuff from a bookstall, that whilst Ahasuerus appears once and again in his own character and personality in the poet’s works, the reader of those works comes no less often on cursory references to the undying wanderer, and on lines that would never have been penned, had it not been for Shelley’s deep and frequent ponderings of the hideous doom of deathlessness, accorded to the supreme sinner of Christian romance. Ahasuerus the Jew figures in Queen Mab (1812-13) and Hellas (1821); he was in the poet’s mind when he meditated the lines of Alastor (1815)—
‘O, that God,
Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice
Which but one living man has drained, who now,
Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels
No proud exemption in the blighting curse
He bears, over the world wanders for ever,
Lone as incarnate death!’
Shelley’s subsequent misconception of the way in which the tragic fragment came into his possession, may be regarded as one of the trivial consequences, though by no means the least curious consequence, of the degree in which the fragment possessed his fancy. As there is no evidence that the author of Queen Mab was in London shortly before the time when the fragment first came under his eyes, and much evidence that he was away from London throughout the certain period, covering the uncertain day on which the fragment was picked up at the bookstall, there is no reason on the score of Medwin’s peculiar mental infirmity to question the accuracy of his precise statement that he was the finder of the transcript, which he describes as ‘not a separate publication,’ but a thing that ‘mixed up with the works of some German poet’ seemed to have been ‘copied ... from a magazine of the day.’ The words of Medwin’s precise averment touching this matter are—
‘Mrs. Shelley is misinformed as to the history of the fragment from the German, which I, not Shelley, picked up in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields (as mentioned in my preface to Ahasuerus), and which was not found till some of the cantos had been written.’
Mrs. Shelley certainly could produce in support of her statement an authority she was bound to regard as respectable. For at the foot of the Queen Mab note (1812-13), from which I have just transcribed the fragment, Shelley says—
‘This fragment is the translation of part of some German work, whose title I have vainly endeavoured to discover. I picked it up, dirty and torn, some years ago, in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields.’
Thus in the course of something less than three years (a period scarcely to be described by so comprehensive a term as ‘some years ago’) Shelley, whilst remembering the scene of the discovery, had come to imagine himself the discoverer, a misapprehension not to be omitted from the schedule of facts, to the credit of those of the poet’s nearest and dearest friends, who have spoken of the little reliance to be placed on his statements respecting himself and his affairs.
The first glimpse of Shelley at Oxford is obtained immediately after his matriculation on 10th of April, 1810, when the tall, slight, long-necked youth, with a square cap on his minute head, and a new gown hanging from his rather round shoulders, entered the Bodleian Library, in the hope of seeing the book from which the fragment had been taken. Had the German book been given him, the freshman would have learnt nothing from it, for he knew nothing of the German tongue at this point of his career. Ignorant alike of the title of the book he wished to see, and of the name of its author, the undergraduate asked for The Wandering Jew,—a request that probably caused the librarian no less amusement than surprise. The librarian had never heard of a book so entitled, but was not wholly ignorant of a periodical (edited by one of the wits of the Great Frederick’s court) which bore the name of interest. Having come to the famous library, under an impression that it contained every book of every language, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, of University College, was not a little disappointed at failing to get a view of the only book he for the moment had a strong desire to look at. The incident points to the time when the youngster was full of the marvellous Jew, and wanted the book for aid in his poetical enterprise.
Enough is known of the poem, that was perused by Campbell and offered to the Ballantynes of Edinburgh, to warrant a strong opinion that originality of thought was not one of its characteristics. One of the cousins (Medwin) lived to think it ‘a sort of thing such as boys usually write, a cento from different favourite authors;’ and probably the other author would have described the puerile performance even more unfavourably, had he written about it in his later time. The vision in the third canto was taken from Lewis’s Monk, one of the bad novels in which Shelley delighted. The crucifixion scene seems to have been lifted bodily into the manuscript from a published work; it was (to use Medwin’s words) ‘altogether a plagiarism from a volume of Cambridge Prize Poems.’ Bold play was doubtless made with ‘the fragment’ by the joint authors, who differed on one important particular,—Shelley wishing to leave the Jew at large, whilst Medwin wished to put a period to the wretch’s sufferings by killing him at the end of the last canto. When seven or eight cantos had been made up in this fashion, the patchwork of shameless plagiarisms was copied fair from the first to the last line by Shelley, and sent off to the Edinburgh publishers who, after keeping the authors a long while in suspense, declined their proposal (without returning the MS.) in the following terms:—
‘Edinburgh, September 24th, 1810.