lips of Prometheus, that "it had become a curse:" the name of Christ.1 I for one could hardly bring myself to doubt that the reviewer of the moment had read aright. No other word indeed will give so adequate a sense, fit in so fairly with the context. It should surely be a creed, a form of faith, upon which the writer here sets his foot. What otherwise shall we take to be "the snaky knot of this foul gordian word"-a word which, "weak itself as stubble," serves yet the turn of tyrants to bind together the rods and axes of their rule? If this does not mean a faith of some kind, and a living faith to this day, then it would seem at first sight that words have no meaning-that the whole divine fabric of that intense and majestic stanza crumbles into sparkling dust, dissolves into sonorous jargon. Any such vaguer substitute as "priest" or "king"

When this passage was written I was of course not ignorant that in an extant manuscript of this poem Shelley had himself filled up the gap with the word "king;" but this certainly did not appear to me a sufficient assurance that such could have been the original reading, aware as I was of the excisions and alterations to which Shelley was compelled by stress of friends or publishers to submit his yet unpublished or half-published poems. I am now,

however, all but convinced that the antithesis intended was between the "king" of this stanza and the "priest" of the next; though I still think that the force and significance of the phrase are grievously impaired if we are to assume that the "foul gordian word" is simply the title of king, and not (as so much of the context would appear to imply) a creed or system of religion which might at the time have appeared to the writer wholly or mainly pernicious. And this, with all his reverence for the divine humanity of Christ, we know that the creed of historical Christianity did always appear to Shelley. In this adoration of the personal Jesus, combined as it was with an equal abhorrence of Christian theology, it is now perhaps superfluous to remark how thoroughly Shelley was at one with Blake-the only poet or thinker then alive with whom he had so much in common.

weakens not one verse only, but makes the rest comparatively feeble and pointless, even if it can be said to leave them any meaning at all; and why any such word should be struck out upon revision of the text by any fool or coward who might so dare, none surely can guess; for such words recur at every turn as terms of reproach. Then comes the question whether Shelley in 1820 would have used so bitter and violent a phrase to express his horror and hatred of the evil wrought in the world by the working of the Christian religion. It may help us to decide if we take into account with how terrible and memorable a name he had already branded it in the eighth stanza of this very poem. That he did to the last regard it as by all historical evidence the invariable accomplice of tyranny-as at once the constant shield and the ready spear of force and of fraud-his latest letters show as clearly as that he did no injustice to "the sublime human character" of its founder. The word "Christ," if received as the true reading, would stand merely as equivalent to the word "Christianity;" the blow aimed at the creed would imply nothing of insult or outrage to the person. Next year indeed Shelley wrote that famous chorus in the "Hellas" which hails the rising of "the folding star of Bethlehem," as with angelic salutation, in sweeter and more splendid words than ever fell from any Christian lyrist. But when that chorus was written Shelley had not changed or softened his views of history and theology. His defence of Grecian cross against Turkish crescent did not imply that he took for a symbol of liberty the ensign of the Christian faith, the banner of Constantine and of Torquemada, under which had fought and conquered such

recruits, and with such arms, as the "paramour" of Dante's Church, who begot on the body of that bride no less hopeful and helpful an offspring than the Holy Inquisition. Such workings of the creed, such developments of the faith, were before Shelley's eyes when he wrote; he had also about him the reek of as foul an incense going up from the priests of that day to their Ferdinand or their George as those of ours have ever sent up to Bonaparte or to Bourbon of their own, mixing with the smell of battlesmoke and blood the more fetid fumes of prayer and praise; and wide as is the gap between his first and his last manner, great as is the leap from "Queen Mab" to "Hellas," the passage of five years had not transformed or worn out the "philanthropist, democrat, and atheist" of 1816. For thus he signed himself in the Swiss album, not merely as ¿ɛos; and the cause or provocation is clear enough; for on the same leaf there appears just above his signature an entry by some one who saw fit here to give vent to an outbreak of overflowing foolery, flagrant and fervid with the godly grease and rancid religion of a conventicle ; some folly about the Alps, God, glory, beneficence, witness of nature to this or that divine thing or person, and such-like matter. A little below is the name of Shelley, with this verse attached :—

I copy the spelling with all due regret and horror, but not without rejoicing on his account that Shelley was clear of Eton when he committed this verse, and had

"L'amoroso drudo

Della fede cristiana."

Paradiso, xii. 55.

now for critic or commentator a Gifford only in place of a Keate.1 The remarks on this entry added by Christian pilgrims who came after are, in the phrase of the archetypal Pecksniff, "very soothing." One of these, I think, observes, with a pleasant pungency of originality, that the fool hath said in his heart-we have seen what.

Most of the emendations or solutions offered by Mr. Rossetti of corrupt or obscure passages in the "Revolt of Islam" seem to me probable and sound; but in this

verse

sense-

"Gestures and looks, such as in whirlwinds bore,
Which might not be withstood "-

I take the verb to be used in the absolute not the active
-" bore onward or forward;" this use of the word
here is a somewhat ungraceful sign of haste, but makes
clear a passage otherwise impracticably dense and chaotic.
Before passing from this poem, I have to express a hope
that a final edition of Shelley's works will some day, rather
sooner than later, restore to it the proper title and the
genuine text. Every change made in it was forced upon
the author by pressure from without; and every change is
for the worse. Has no reader ever asked himself what can
be the meaning of the second title? What is the revolt
of Islam? Islam is not put forward as the sole creed of

A reference to the Eton Lists has shown me the truth of what I had long suspected, that the school-days of Shelley must have ended before the beginning of Dr. Keate's reign as Head Master. In effect, I find that Shelley, then a fifth form boy, left in 1808, and that the Head Mastership of Dr. Keate began in 1809. The jocularities, therefore, of Mr. Hogg as to the mutual relations of Shelley and the "Old Boy" prove to be like most of his other jests -as baseless as they are pointless.

the tyrants and slaves who play their parts here with such frank ferocity; Persian and Indian, Christian and Mahometan mythologies are massed together for attack. And certainly Islam is not, as the rules of language would imply, the creed of the insurgents. Could the phrase "revolt of the Christians" be taken to signify a revolt against the Christians? There is at least meaning in the first title-" Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City." Readers may prefer a text which makes hero and heroine strangers in blood, but the fact remains that Shelley saw fit to make them brother and sister, and to defend their union as essentially innocent even if socially condemnable. The letters printed in the "Shelley Memorials" show with what staunch resolution he clung to this point, when beaten upon by remonstrance from all sides. This most singular of his social and ethical heresies was indeed never quite thrown over. "Incest," he wrote in 1819 to Mrs. Gisborne, with reference to Calderon's tragic treatment of the story of Amnon and Tamar, " is, like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance. It may be the excess of love or hate. It may be the defiance of everything for the sake of another, which clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism; or it may be that cynical rage which,

It may be objected that the creed from which the insurgent population has been delivered by the preaching of Laon and Cythna was that of Islam, and that the word is here used to express not the doctrine itself, but the mass of men or nations reared in the belief or tradition of that doctrine. This use may doubtless be permissible, and does afford a reasonable sense to the later title of the poem; but the original title as well as the original text still seems to me preferable.