This statement of Medwin finally settles the question. The 'friend' at
whose request, Mrs. Shelley says, [Footnote: The Hymns of Pan and
Apollo were first published by Mrs. Shelley in _the Posthumous Poems_,
1824, with a note saying that they had been 'written at the request of
a friend to be inserted in a drama on the subject of Midas'.
_Arethusa_ appeared in the same volume, dated 'Pisa, 1820'.
Proserpine's song was not published before the first collected edition
of 1839.] the lyrics were written by her husband, was herself. And she
was the author of the dramas. [Footnote: Not E. E. Williams (Buxton
Forman, ed. 1882, vol. iv, p. 34). The manuscript of the poetical play
composed about 1822 by the latter, 'The Promise', with Shelley's
autograph poem ('Night! with all thine eyes look down'), was given to
the Bodleian Library in 1914.]

The manuscript (Bodleian Library, MS. Shelley, d. 2) looks like a
cheap exercise-book, originally of 40, now of 36 leaves, 8 1/4 x 6
inches, in boards. The contents are the dramas here presented, written
in a clear legible hand--the equable hand of Mrs. Shelley. [Footnote:
Shelley's lyrics are also in his wife's writing--Mr. Locock is surely
mistaken in assuming two different hands to this manuscript (_The
Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley_, Methuen, 1909, vol. iii, p. xix).]
There are very few words corrected or cancelled. It is obviously a
fair copy. Mr. C. D. Locock, in his _Examination of the Shelley
Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library_ (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1903,
pp. 24-25), has already pointed out the valuable emendations of the
'received' text of Shelley's lyrics which are found here. In fact the
only mystery is why neither Shelley, nor Mary in the course of her
long widowed years, should have published these curious, and surely
not contemptible, by-products of their co-operation in the fruitful