met with many censurers, not only among those who allow of no virtue but
such as supports the cause they espouse, but even among those whose
opinions were similar to his own. I extract a portion of a letter
written in answer to one of these friends. It best details the impulses
of Shelley's mind, and his motives: it was written with entire
unreserve; and is therefore a precious monument of his own opinion of
his powers, of the purity of his designs, and the ardour with which he
clung, in adversity and through the valley of the shadow of death, to
views from which he believed the permanent happiness of mankind must
eventually spring.


'Marlowe, December 11, 1817.

'I have read and considered all that you say about my general powers,
and the particular instance of the poem in which I have attempted to
develop them. Nothing can be more satisfactory to me than the interest
which your admonitions express. But I think you are mistaken in some
points with regard to the peculiar nature of my powers, whatever be
their amount. I listened with deference and self-suspicion to your
censures of "The Revolt of Islam"; but the productions of mine which you
commend hold a very low place in my own esteem; and this reassures me,
in some degree at least. The poem was produced by a series of thoughts
which filled my mind with unbounded and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the
precariousness of my life, and I engaged in this task, resolved to leave
some record of myself. Much of what the volume contains was written with
the same feeling--as real, though not so prophetic--as the
communications of a dying man. I never presumed indeed to consider it
anything approaching to faultless; but, when I consider contemporary
productions of the same apparent pretensions, I own I was filled with