(2) Whilst Shelley’s title to be regarded as the author of The Ode rests on the ‘Shelleyan flavour’ of the poem, which in that respect differs from all the poetry known to have proceeded from his pen before the end of 1810, his claim to be regarded as one of the producers of the ‘prose essays on some of the older English poets’ (which appeared in the Oxford Herald during his residence at the University) rests on the fact that one of these essays is signed, ‘P. S.’ ‘One of the papers, signed “P. S.”’ says Mr. MacCarthy, ‘appeared during the period of Shelley’s residence, and may possibly have been written by him.’ It is quite as probable that some Peter Smith, or other person with P. S. for his initials, wrote the verses.
(3) Consisting altogether of the two initial letters, the evidence which disposes Mr. MacCarthy to rate the poet with the literary essayists of the Oxford newspaper, cannot be declared convincingly cogent and conclusive. It is, however, far less weak and shadowy than the evidence that the undergraduate of University College, Oxford, produced the English translations from the Greek Anthologia, which appeared in the Oxford Herald of 5th January, and 12th January, 1811, with the signature ‘S’ attached to each set of verses. After identifying Shelley with the translator by this solitary letter, Mr. MacCarthy next argues that, having been thus detected in translating verses of the Greek Anthologia, Shelley may be fairly suspected of being, and indeed assumed to be, the translator of the epigram by Vincent Bourne, that appeared in English dress in the Oxford Herald of 23rd February, 1811 (signed ‘Versificator’); and also the translator (signing himself ‘Versificator’) who produced the English versions of two epigrams from the Greek Anthologia, that appeared in the Oxford Herald of 9th March, 1811. To those, who hesitate in declaring Shelley the producer of the two January translations, because his surname began with the letter ‘S,’ it may well appear considerably less than manifest that Shelley should be regarded as the producer of Versificator’s translations, because he had a taste for making verses. After arguing that ‘S’ was Shelley, because the Shelleys resembled the Smiths in one interesting particular, and that ‘Versificator’ must have been Shelley, because Shelley had as good a right as any one else to style himself so, this perplexing Mr. MacCarthy (who is of so much account with the Shelleyan experts) tells us in a note, that some one, during Shelley’s time at Oxford, sent a translation from Vincent Bourne to the Oxford Herald, signed ‘S. S.—Edmonton.’ On such trifles and trifling, weeks and months were wasted by the Shelleyan expert, who, with all his boastful show of laborious research, never troubled himself to find out, when Shelley and Hogg became members of their University.
III. For reasons, with which there is no need to trouble the reader of the present chapter, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy holds a strong opinion that the spurious letter, alleged to have been written by Shelley from University College on 22nd February, 1811, to ‘The Editor of the Statesman,’ may have been a genuine performance, although it appeared for the first time to the public in the notorious Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1852), that passed through Mr. Robert Browning’s editorial hands only to provoke the scrutiny, that was followed quickly by their suppression. Maintaining that the letter may have been genuine, Mr. MacCarthy is only a few degrees less confident that the epistle was the genuine performance of the undergraduate who, ten days later, wrote Leigh Hunt the epistle that seems to have been studied by the manufacturer of the forgery.
Opening with a long paragraph, whose style affords conclusive evidence that it was not composed by the Oxonian Shelley, the epistle of the earlier date closes with the following sentences taken verbatim from the letter of later date:—
‘The ultimate intention of my aim is to induce a meeting of such enlightened, unprejudiced members of the community, whose independent principles expose them to evils which might thus become alleviated; and to form a methodical society, which should be organized so as to resist the coalition of the enemies of liberty, which at present renders any expression of opinion on matters of policy dangerous to individuals.... Although perfectly unacquainted with you privately, I address you as a common friend to liberty, thinking that, in cases of this urgency and importance, etiquette ought not to stand in the way of usefulness.’
Whilst these two sentences accord in style with the rest of the letter to which they properly belong (the genuine letter addressed to Leigh Hunt on 2nd March, 1811), they are preceded in the spurious epistle of later manufacture and earlier date (22nd February, 1811) with writing of this incongruent style:—
‘Sir,—The present age has been distinguished from every former period of English history by the number of those writers who have suffered the penalties of the law for the freedom and spirit with which they descanted on the morals of the age, and chastised the vices or ridiculed the follies of individuals of every rank of life, and among every description of society. In former periods of British civilization, as during the flourishing ages of Greece and Rome, the oratorical censor, and the satirical poet, were regarded as exercising only that just pre-eminence to which superior genius and an intimate knowledge of life and human nature were conceived to entitle them. The MacFlecknoe of Dryden, the Dunciad and the satirical imitations of Pope, remained secure from molestation by the Attorney-General; the literary castigators of a Bolingbroke and a Wharton enjoyed the triumph of truth and justice unawed by ex-officios; and Addison could describe a coward and a liar without being called to account for his inuendos by the interference of the judicial servants of the king. But times are altered, and a man may now be sent to prison for a couple of years, and ruined perhaps for life, because he calls a spade a spade, and tells a public individual the very truths that are obvious to the most partial of his friends.’
So fine a judge of ‘Shelleyan flavour’ as Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy ought surely to have observed how greatly this piece of writing differs in style and quality from the prose of Shelley’s novels, his Oxonian letters to Stockdale and Hogg, his Irish addresses, and all his prose writings of the same period. Instead of discovering the difference, however, our nice connoisseur of ‘Shelleyan flavour,’ and the historic probabilities, exclaims in a rapturous note to the last sentence of the quotation:—
‘This passage proves almost conclusively that the person addressed as “Editor of the Statesman” must have been Mr. Finnerty. The public individual of whom he published those obvious truths that were pronounced a libel by Lord Ellenborough was Lord Castlereagh. The former editor of the Statesman, Mr. Lovell, was suffering imprisonment for a different offence.’
There is no evidence that Mr. Finerty was, or ever had been, the editor of the Statesman. There are no grounds for thinking he ever had been the editor of that paper. Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy admits he has no reason to think Mr. Finerty ever was editor of the Statesman. Yet he insists that this spurious letter (genuine epistle as he thinks), dated 22nd February, 1811, to the Editor of the Statesman, must have been addressed to a man (who was not that paper’s editor), because it contains a reference to the imprisonment of some person in terms quite as applicable to an imprisoned journalist who had never been, as to an imprisoned journalist who had been or was editor of that paper.