MS." of "Julian and Maddalo", Mr. Buxton Forman, the most conservative
of editors, finds it necessary to supplement Shelley's punctuation in
no fewer than ninety-four places.), and sometimes punctuates
capriciously. In the very act of transcribing his mind was apt to
stray from the work in hand to higher things; he would lose himself in
contemplating those airy abstractions and lofty visions of which alone
he greatly cared to sing, to the neglect and detriment of the merely
external and formal element of his song. Shelley recked little of the
jots and tittles of literary craftsmanship; he committed many a small
sin against the rules of grammar, and certainly paid but a halting
attention to the nice distinctions of punctuation. Thus in the early
editions a comma occasionally plays the part of a semicolon; colons
and semicolons seem to be employed interchangeably; a semicolon almost
invariably appears where nowadays we should employ the dash; and,
lastly, the dash itself becomes a point of all work, replacing
indifferently commas, colons, semicolons or periods. Inadequate and
sometimes haphazard as it is, however, Shelley's punctuation, so far
as it goes, is of great value as an index to his metrical, or at
times, it may be, to his rhetorical intention--for, in Shelley's
hands, punctuation serves rather to mark the rhythmical pause and
onflow of the verse, or to secure some declamatory effect, than to
indicate the structure or elucidate the sense. For this reason the
original pointing has been retained, save where it tends to obscure or
pervert the poet's meaning. Amongst the Editor's Notes at the end of
the Volume 3 the reader will find lists of the punctual variations in
the longer poems, by means of which the supplementary points now added
may be identified, and the original points, which in this edition have
been deleted or else replaced by others, ascertained, in the order of
their occurrence. In the use of capitals Shelley's practice has been
followed, while an attempt has been made to reduce the number of his