You have heard, of course, of the melancholy suicide of Sir Samuel Romilly. I do not remember any event that has produced so deep a public sensation. He was undoubtedly an admirable man; and I do not know any one whose parliamentary existence was so completely devoted to public good.

You are also, I suppose, informed of the withdrawing the army of occupation from France. Lord Liverpool, we are told, has in consequence insisted upon a large reduction of our peace establishment, and made this measure the sine quâ non of his continuing in office. This is supposed to be owing to the turn matters took in the General Election. So far we have really made some advance in the scale of improvement.

The last letters I received from Mary are of the date of August 3rd and October 1st. In the October letter, she apparently laboured under great depression of spirits, in consequence of the loss of her infant. I hope she has by this time recovered her accustomed tone, and is happy.

Very affectionately yours,

WILLIAM GODWIN.

From Mrs. Shelley to Mrs. Gisborne.

MY DEAR MRS. GISBORNE,

Naples, Dec., 1818.

I hasten to answer your kind letter as soon as we are a little recovered from the fatigue of our long jurney, although I still feel wearied and overcome by it, so you must expect a very stupid letter. We set out from Este the day after I wrote to you. We remained one day at Ferrara and two at Bologna, looking at the memorials preserved of Tasso and Ariosto in the former town, and at the most exquisite pictures in the latter. Afterwards, we proceeded along the coast road by Rimini, Fano, Fossombrone, &c. We saw the divine waterfall, Terni, and arrived safely at Rome. We performed this journey with our own horses, with Paolo to drive us, which we found a very economical, but a very disagreeable way; so we shall not attempt it again. To you, who have seen Rome, I need not say how enchanted we were with the first view of Rome and its antiquities. One drawback they have at present, which I hope will be fully compensated for in the future.

The ruins are filled with galley slaves at work. They are propping the Coliseum, and making very deep excavations in the Forum. We remained a week at Rome, and our fears for the journey to Naples were entirely removed. They said here that there had not been a robbery on the road for eight months. This we found afterwards to be an exaggeration; but it tranquillized us so much that Shelley went on first, to secure us lodgings, and we followed a day or two after. We found the road guarded, and the only part of the road where there was any talk of fear was between Terracina and Fondi, when it was not thought desirable we should set out from the former place before daylight. Shelley travelled with a Lombard merchant and a Neapolitan priest. He remained only two nights on the road, and he went veterino; so you may guess he had to travel early and late. The priest, a great, strong, muscular fellow, was almost in convulsions with fear, to travel before daylight along the Pontine marshes. There was talk of two bishops murdered, and that touched him nearly. The robbers spare foreigners, but never Neapolitan men, if they are young and strong; so he was the worst off of the party. The merchant did not feel very comfortable, and they were both surprised at Shelley's quietness. That quiet was disturbed, however, between Capua and Naples, by an assassination committed in broad daylight before their eyes. A young man ran out of a shop on the road, followed by a woman armed with a great stick and a man with a great knife. The man overtook him, and stabbed him in the nape of the neck, so that he fell down instantly, stone dead. The fearful priest laughed heartily at Shelley's horror on the occasion.

Well, we are now settled in comfortable lodgings, which Shelley took for three louis a week, opposite the Royal Gardens-you no doubt remember the situation. We have a full view of the bay from our windows; so I think we are well off. As yet we have seen nothing; but we shall soon make some excursions in the environs.

Ever yours affectionately,

MARY W. SHELLEY.

109

CHAPTER IX.

"PROMETHEUS UNBOUND:"

66
THE CENCI."

THE early part of the year 1819 was spent by the Shelleys at Naples, and was diversified by excursions to Pæstum, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Vesuvius, Baiæ, Lago d'Agnano, &c. ; but in March they returned to Rome, where every day was occupied in explorations and visits, in wanderings among the sublime ruins of antiquity, and in meditations on the past. Their happiness, however, was soon interrupted by the death, in the early summer, of their son William-at that time their only surviving child. Shelley suffered the deepest anguish from this event; and the grief of Mrs. Shelley was no less. The child was buried in the English cemetery; in allusion to which place, Shelley wrote:-"This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic ; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child lies buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body; the other crushes the affections."

Harping on the same mournful string, he thus addresses his dead child in verse:

My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid,
Here its ashes find a tomb;

But beneath this pyramid

Thou art not. If a thing divine,
Like thee, can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother's grief and mine.

In the spring of 1819, Shelley wrote one of the greatest of his works, the Prometheus Unbound. The spot he selected for his study was that occupied by the ruined baths of Caracalla-a maze of gigantic chambers, open to the sky, and carpeted with verdure; of shattered towers, wreathed with a drapery of glorious weeds and trailing ivy, with which the stonework has become almost incorporated; of heaped masses of masonry, out of which spring groves of flowering shrubs; of broken arches, winding staircases, and hidden nooks for solitary thought. Here he worked with wonderful assiduity, and very soon completed the drama in three acts: the fourth was added several months after, when the poet was at Florence. All attentive readers of this wonderful work will agree with Mrs. Shelley in thinking that the lucent atmosphere of Rome, the exquisite vegetation of the surrounding wastes, and the sublime objects of art, whether of antiquity or of later times, which met his eyes in every direction, helped the sensi

The

tive imagination of Shelley to conceive those superhuman visions of loveliness and awful might which throng the scenes of Prometheus Unbound. But only his own subtle, and almost instinctive, apprehension of metaphysical analogies could have enabled him to endow his ideal characters with a language proper to the abstract ideas which they typify. This is the intuition of genius, which not only can create an imaginary world, but can govern it by laws in harmony with themselves and with that which they control. personifications of Shelley's mythological drama are not the vague idealisms of a young poet seeking for effect; they have a deep psychological meaning. The poetry which they utter is like the language of beings wakening, in the fresh dawn of the world, to the mystery of their own emotions and the miraculous loveliness of the universe. We seem to behold the elemental splendour of things disarrayed of that indifference which springs from our superficial familiarity, and from the deadening effect of our conventional existence.

The drama, though written in 1819, was not published till 1820.

Several of Shelley's letters about this period have reference to a project, which he set on foot, of a steamboat to ply between Marseilles and Leghorn: the construction of this boat was to be managed by Mr. Reveley, the son of Mrs. Gisborne by a former marriage, to whom reference has already been made, and who was an engineer. The pecuniary profit was to belong solely