[8] Dr. Garnett, in his prefatory note, states that Orpheus ‘exists only in a transcript by Mrs. Shelley, who has written in playful allusion to her toils as amanuensis Aspetto fin che il diluvio cala, ed allora cerco di posare argine alle sue parole’. The poem is thus supposed to have been Shelley’s attempt at improvisation, if not indeed a translation from the Italian of the ‘improvvisatore’ Sgricci. The Shelleys do not seem to have come to know and hear Sgricci before the end of December 1820. The Italian note after all has no very clear import. And Dr. Garnett in 1905 inclined to the view that Orpheus was the work not of Shelley, but of his wife. A comparison of that fragment and the dramas here published seems to me to suggest the same conclusion, though in both cases Mary Shelley must have been helped by her husband.
[9] As published by Medwin, 1834 and 1847.
[10] The copy, 2 vols., was sold at Sotheby’s on the 6th December 1906: Mr. H. Buxton Forman (who was, I think, the buyer) published the contents in The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, By Thomas Medwin, A New Edition printed from a copy copiously amended and extended by the Author . . . Milford, 1913. The passage here quoted appears on p. 27 of the 2nd vol. of the 1847 edition (Forman ed., p. 252)
[11] The Hymns of Pan and Apollo were first published by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems, 1824, with a note saying that they had been ‘written at the request of a friend to be inserted in a drama on the subject of Midas’. Arethusa appeared in the same volume, dated ‘Pisa, 1820’. Proserpine’s song was not published before the first collected edition of 1839.
[12] Not E. E. Williams (Buxton Forman, ed. 1882, vol. iv, p. 34). The manuscript of the poetical play composed about 1822 by the latter, ‘The Promise’, with Shelley’s autograph poem (‘Night! with all thine eyes look down’), was given to the Bodleian Library in 1914.
[13] Shelley’s lyrics are also in his wife’s writing—Mr. Locock is surely mistaken in assuming two different hands to this manuscript (The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Methuen, 1909, vol. iii, p. xix).
II.
For indeed there is more than a personal interest attached to these writings of Mrs. Shelley’s. The fact that the same mind which had revelled, a few years earlier, in the fantastical horrors of Frankenstein’s abortive creation, could now dwell on the melancholy fate of Proserpine or the humorous disappointment of Midas, and delight in their subtle poetical or moral symbolism—this fact has its significance. It is one of the earliest indications of the revival, in the heart of Romanticism, of the old love of classical myths and classical beauty.
The subject is a wide one, and cannot be adequately dealt with in this place. But a few words may not be superfluous for a correct historical appreciation of Mrs. Shelley’s attempt.