EDITOR’S PREFACE.
These two volumes contain a complete collection of Shelley’s Prose Writings; the two youthful prose romances of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne; the Dublin and Marlow pamphlets; the long-lost and lately-found Refutation of Deism; the Letter to Lord Ellenborough; the curious review of Hogg’s romance of Alexy Haimatoff, recently unearthed by Professor Dowden; a number of minor papers originally published by Medwin; and the entire collection of “Essays and Letters from Abroad,” first issued by Mrs. Shelley in 1840, and which throw so much light on Shelley’s character and genius. The Bibliography appended to the second volume will, it is hoped, be of real service to all lovers and students of Shelley.
Shelley is another instance of the fact that a great master of verse is always a good writer of prose. Whatever may be thought of the crudity of his juvenile romances—and the greatest Shelleyan enthusiasts, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti, have successively laughed at them—they contain at least vivid descriptions of natural appearances; while his political pamphlets, as a recent writer has pointed out, are weighty and sententious to a wonderful degree, considering the age at which they were written. That he was a delightful letter-writer, full of grace and easy fluency, the letters to Peacock and to Leigh Hunt abundantly prove; while of his critical powers, especially in regard to sculpture and painting, both these and the posthumous papers published by Medwin give us no mean idea, though we may not be prepared to go quite so far as Mr. Matthew Arnold does when he says that he doubts whether Shelley’s “delightful Essays and Letters, which deserve to be far more read than they are now, will not resist the wear and tear of time better, and finally come to stand higher, than his poetry.”
RICHARD HERNE SHEPHERD
Kingston Vale,
Lent, 1888.
