ago." Let us leave them and their squabbles over what is
unessential, their raking up of old letters and old stories.

The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who
has produced two heavy volumes, styled by him "The Real Shelley."
The real Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a
worthy gentleman so prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by
the wrong handle that I wonder he has not made a name in the exact
science of Comparative Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit
of that Christian Apologist, the Englishman who called you "a damned
Atheist" in the post-office at Pisa. He finds that you had "a
little turned-up nose," a feature no less important in his system
than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to Pascal) in the history
of the world. To be in harmony with your nose, you were a
"phenomenal" liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly insane,
an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of self-
approbation--in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.
Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, "a
bad old man." But enough of this inopportune brawler.

For Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts
extinction in a night of Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly--as
slowly as doom came on Jupiter in your "Prometheus," but as surely.
If this nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid
hut on the ice-bound Equator, will read, by a fading lamp charged
with the dregs of the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley. So
reading, he, the latest of his race, will not wholly be deprived of
those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life worth
enduring. In your verse he will have sight of sky, and sea, and
cloud, the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse. He