shock in the illness and death of a younger brother, whose bedside he had attended when he ought to have been nursing an illness of his own, not to mention some other perplexities of a nature too delicate, though unfounded, to be mentioned here, he put forth his last volume with little hope of its doing any thing but showing what he might have done; and withdrew into silence and the arms of his friends to die. It is certain, that he had made up his mind to this premature end a good while before it took place. During his sufferings, which were considerable, owing to the consciousness of what he might have performed, the disdain of his own physical weakness, which subjected him to impressions from his enemies that he otherwise despised, and above all, to a very tender hope which he had reason to indulge, and which he now saw he must give up in this world, he nevertheless exhibited a manly submission, and took a pleasure in showing himself sensible of the attentions he experienced. After residing some months in the houses of Mr Charles Brown, Mr Leigh Hunt, and other friends at Hampstead, he was prevailed upon to try the climate of Italy, where he arrived, but without effect, in the month of November, 1820, accompanied by his friend, Mr Severn, a young artist of great promise, since well-known as the principal English student at Rome; and in Rome, on the 27th of December following, in the arms of this gentleman, who attended him with undeviating zeal, he expired, completely worn out, and wearied of life. His lingering death-bed was so painful to him, that he used eagerly to watch the countenance of the physician, in hopes of seeing what others would have called the fatal sentence; yet so sweet was his natural taste of life, and so irrepressible his poetical tendencies to the last, that a little before he died, speaking of the grave he was about to occupy, he said, “he felt the daisies growing over him." He was interred in the English burying-ground, near the monument of Caius Cestius, and not far from the grave in which was soon after deposited his poetical mourner, Mr Shelly, who had made him the handsomest offers to come and live with him in Tuscany. It is a mistake to attribute Mr Keats's death- -as Lord Byron has done among others—to the attacks of the critics; and his lordship was told of it, before the passage to that purpose in Don Juan appeared; but a lively couplet, with a good rhyme to it, is hard for a wit to part with. The attacks may have accelerated, and undoubtedly embittered his death; but the cause of it was a consumptive tendency, of an extreme kind, and of long standing. When his body was opened, there was scarcely any portion of lungs remaining. The physicians declared, that they wondered how he could have held out so long; and said, that nothing could have enabled him to do it but the spirit within him. Mr Keats had a very manly, as well as delicate spirit. He was personally courageous in no ordinary degree, and had the usual superiority of genius to little arts and the love of money. His patrimony, which was inconsiderable, he freely used in part, and even risked altogether, to relieve the wants of others, and farther their views. He could be hot now and then; and perhaps was a little proud, owing to the humbleness of his origin, and the front he thought it necessary to present to vulgar abuse. He was handsome, with remarkably beautiful hair, curling in natural ringlets. Mr Keats's poems have been so often criticised both by friends and enemies, and have succeeded, since his death, in securing him so unequivocal a reputation as a highly promising genius, that it will be necessary to say comparatively little of them here. If it was unlucky for his immediate success, that he came before the public recommended by a political party; it was fortunate for him with posterity, that he began to write at a period when original thinking, and a dependence on a man's own resources, were earnestly inculcated on all sides. Of his standing with posterity we have no doubt. He will be considered, par excellence, as the young poet; as the one who poured forth at the earliest age the greatest unequivocal exuberance, and who proceeded very speedily to show that maturity brought him a judgment equal to the task of pruning it, and rendering it immortal. He had the two highest qualities of a poet, in the highest degree-sensibility and imagination. His 'Endymion,' with all its young faults, will be a store-house for the lovers of genuine poetry, both young and old; a wood to wander in; a solitude inhabited by creatures of superhuman beauty and intellect; and superabundant in the luxuries of a poetical domain, not omitting "weeds of glorious feature." Its most obvious fault was a negligence of rhyme ostentatiously careless, which, by the common law of extremes, produced the very effect he wished to avoid—a pressure of itself on the reader. The fragment of Hyperion,' which was his last performance, and which extorted the admiration of Lord Byron, has been compared to those bones of enormous creatures which are occasionally dug up, and remind us of extraordinary and gigantic times. Percy Bysshe Shelley. BORN A. D. 1792.-DIED A. D. 1822. THIS gifted but erring genius, was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, Baronet, of Castle Goring, Sussex; and was born at his father's seat, on the 4th of August, 1792. The following biographical notice of him is from the pen of his friend and associate, Captain Medwin : Percy Bysshe Shelley was removed from a private school at thirteen, and sent to Eton. He there showed a character of great eccentricity, mixed in none of the amusements natural to his age, was of a melancholy and reserved disposition, fond of solitude, and made few friends. Neither did he distinguish himself much at Eton, for he had a great contempt for modern Latin verses, and his studies were directed to any thing rather than the exercises of his class. It was from an early acquaintance with German writers, that ne probably imbibed a romantic turn of mind; at least, we find him, before fifteen, publishing two RosaMatilda-like novels, called, Justrozzi,' and 'The Rosicrucian,' that bore no marks of being the productions of a boy, and were much talked of and reprobated as immoral by the journalists of the day. He also made great progress in chemistry. He used to say, that nothing ever delighted him so much as the discovery that there were no elements of earth, fire, or water; but before he left school he nearly lost his life by being blown up in one of his experiments, and gave up the pursuit. He now turned his mind to metaphysics, and became infected with the materialism of the French school. Even before he was sent to University college, Oxford, he had entered into an epistolary theological controversy with a dignitary of the church, under the feigned name of a woman; and, after the second term, he printed a pamphlet with a most extravagant title, The Necessity of Atheism.' This silly work, which was only a recapitulation of some of the arguments of Voltaire and the philosophers of the day, he had the madness to circulate among the bench of bishops, not even disguising his name. The consequence was an obvious one; he was summoned before the heads of the college, and refusing to retract his opinions, on the contrary preparing to argue them with the examining masters, was expelled the university. This disgrace in itself affected Shelley but little at the time, but was fatal to all his hopes of happiness and prospects in life; for it deprived him of his first love, and was the eventual means of alienating him for ever from his family. For some weeks after this expulsion his father refused to receive him under his roof; and when he did, treated him with such marked coldness, that he soon quitted what he no longer considered his home, went to London privately, and thence eloped to Gretna Green, with a Miss Westbrook-their united ages amounting to thirtythree. This last act exasperated his father to such a degree, that he now broke off all communication with Shelley. After some stay in Edinburgh, we trace him into Ireland; and, that country being in a disturbed state, find him publishing a pamphlet, which had a great sale, and the object of which was to soothe the minds of the people, telling them that moderate firmness, and not open rebellion, would most tend to conciliate, and to give them their liberties. He also spoke at some of their public meetings with great fluency and eloquence. Returning to England the latter end of 1812, and being at that time an admirer of Mr Southey's poems, he paid a visit to the lakes, where himself and his wife passed several days at Keswick. He now became devoted to poetry, and after imbuing himself with "The Age of Reason,' 'Spinosa,' and 'The Political Justice,' composed his 'Queen Mab,' and presented it to most of the literary characters of the day,―among the rest to Lord Byron, who speaks of it in his note to The Two Foscari' thus:-"I showed it to Mr Sotheby as a poem of great power and imagination. I never wrote a line of the notes, nor ever saw them, except in their published form. No one knows better than the real author, that his opinions and mine differ materially upon the metaphysical portion of that work; though, in common with all who are not blinded by baseness and bigotry, I highly admire the poetry of that and his other productions." It is to be remarked here, that Queen Mab,' eight or ten years afterwards, fell into the hands or a bookseller, who published it on his own account; and on its publication, and subsequent prosecution, Shelley disclaimed the opinions contained in that work, as being the crude notions of his youth. His marriage, by which he had two children, soon turned out-as might have been expected-an unhappy one, and a separation ensuing in 1816, he went abroad, and passed the summer of that year in Switzerland, where the scenery of that romantic country tended to make nature a passion and enjoyment; and at Geneva he formed a friendship for Lord Byron, which was destined to last for life. It has -6 been said that the perfection of every thing Lord Byron wrote at Diodati, (his third canto of Childe Harold,' his Manfred,' and 'Prisoner of Chillon,') owed something to the critical judgment that Shelley exercised over those works, and to his dosing him-as he used to say-with Wordsworth. In the autumn of this year we find the subject of this memoir at Como, where he wrote 'Rosalind and Helen,' an eclogue, and an ode to the Euganean Hills, marked with great pathos and beauty. His first visit to Italy was short, for he was soon called to England by his wife's melancholy fate, which ever after threw a cloud over his own. The year subsequent to this event, he married Mary Wolstoncraft Godwin, daughter of the celebrated Mary Wolstoncraft and Godwin; and shortly before this period, heir to an income of many thousands a-year, and a baronetage, he was in such pecuniary distress, that he was nearly dying of hunger in the streets! Finding, soon after his coming of age, that he was entitled to some reversionary property in fee, he sold it to his father for an annuity of £1,000 a-year, and took a house at Marlow, where he persevered more than ever in his poetical and classical studies. It was during his residence in. Buckinghamshire that he wrote his Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude;' and perhaps one of the most perfect specimens of harmony, in blank verse, that our language possesses, and full of the wild scenes which his imagination had treasured up in his Alpine excursions. In this poem he deifies nature much in the same way that Wordsworth did in his earlier productions. Inattentive to pecuniary matters, and generous to excess, he soon found that he could not live on his income; and, still unforgiven by his family, he came to a resolution of quitting his native country, and never returning to it. There was another circumstance also that tended to disgust him with England: his children were taken from him by the Lord Chancellor, on the ground of his atheism. He again crossed the Alps, and took up his residence at Venice. There he strengthened his intimacy with Lord Byron, and wrote his 'Revolt of Islam,' an allegorical poem in the Spencer stanza. Noticed very favourably in Blackwood's Magazine,' it fell under the lash of 'The Quarterly,' which indulged itself in much personal abuse of the author, both openly in the review of that work, and insidiously under the critique of Hunt's Foliage.' Perhaps little can be said for the philosophy of 'The Loves of Laon and Cythra.' Like Mr Owen of Lanark, he believed in the perfectibility of human nature, and looked forward to a period when a new golden age would return to earth,-when all the different creeds and systems of the world would be amalgamated into one,―crime disappear, and man, freed from shackles civil and religious, bow before the throne" of his own awless soul," or " of the Power unknown." Wild and visionary as such a speculation must be confessed to be in the present state of society, it sprang from a mind enthusiastic in its wishes for the good of the species, and the amelioration of mankind and of society; and however mistaken the means of bringing about this reform or 66 revolt," may be considered, the object of his whole life and writings seems to have been to develope them. This is particularly -observable in his next work, 'The Prometheus Unbound,' a bold attempt to revive a lost play of schylus. This drama shows an acquaintance with the Greek tragedy-writers, which perhaps no other person possessed in an equal degree, and was written at Rome amid the flower-covered ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. At Rome, also, he formed the story of The Cenci' into a tragedy, which, but for the harrowing nature of the subject, and the prejudice against any thing bearing his name, could not have failed to have had the greatest success,-if not on the stage, at least in the closet. Lord Byron was of opinion that it was the best play the age had produced, and not unworthy of the immediate followers of Shakspeare. After passing several months at Naples, he finally settled with his lovely and amiable wife in Tuscany, where he passed the last four years in domestic retirement and intense application to study. His acquirements were great. He was, perhaps, the first classic in Europe. The books he considered the models of style for prose and poetry, were Plato and the Greek dramatists. He had made himself equally master of the modern languages. Calderon, in Spanish; Petrarch and Dante, in Italian; and Goethe and Schiller, in German, were his favourite authors. French he never read, and said he never could understand the beauty of Racine. Discouraged by the ill success of his writings,-persecuted by the malice of his enemies,-hated by the world,—an outcast from his family, and a martyr to a painful complaint, he was subject to occasional fits of melancholy and dejection. For the last four years, though he continued to write, he had given up publishing. There were two occasions, however, that induced him to break through his resolution. His ardent love of liberty inspired him to write 'Hellas, or the Triumph of Greece,' a drama, since translated into Greek, and which he inscribed to his friend, Prince Mavrocordato; and his attachment to Keats led him to publish an elegy, which he entitled 'Adonais.' This last is, perhaps, the most perfect of all his compositions, and the one he himself considered so. Among the mourners at the funeral of his poet-friend he draws this portrait of himself (the stanzas were afterwards expunged from the elegy) : " 'Mid others of less note came one frail form, A phantom among men,—companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm, Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey. His head was bound with pansies overblown, And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue; And a light spear, topp'd with a cypress cone, Shook the weak hand that grasp'd it. He came the last, neglected and apart Of that crew A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter's dart!' The last eighteen months of Shelley's life were passed in daily intercourse with Lord Byron, to whom the amiability, gentleness, and elegance of his manners, and his great talents and acquirements, had endeared him. Like his friend, he wished to die young: he perished VIII. 2 I |