flesh-creeping school of skeletons and clanking chains, of
convulsions and ecstasies, which Miss Austen, though no one
knew it, had killed with laughter years before.[3] "Verezzi
scarcely now shuddered when the slimy lizard crossed his naked
and motionless limbs. The large earthworms, which twined
themselves in his long and matted hair, almost ceased to excite
sensations of horror"--that is the kind of stuff in which the
imagination of the young Shelley rioted. And evidently it is
not consciously imagined; life really presented itself to him
as a romance of this kind, with himself as hero--a hero who is
a hopeless lover, blighted by premature decay, or a wanderer
doomed to share the sins and sorrows of mankind to all
eternity. This attitude found vent in a mass of sentimental
verse and prose, much of it more or less surreptitiously
published, which the researches of specialists have brought to
light, and which need not be dwelt upon here.

[2 So Mr. H. B. Forman suggests in the introduction to his
edition of Shelley's Prose Works. But Hogg says that he did
not begin learning German until 1815.]

[3 'Northanger Abbey', satirising Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, was
written before 1798, but was not published until 1818.]

But very soon another influence began to mingle with this
feebly extravagant vein, an influence which purified and
strengthened, though it never quite obliterated it. At school
he absorbed, along with the official tincture of classical
education, a violent private dose of the philosophy of the
French Revolution; he discovered that all that was needed to