Jane"? Are not the proceedings of our youth and manhood, the people we have known, the conversations we have shared in, the letters we have written and received, and the houses we have inhabited, quite as valuable a portion of the vast mass of human existence as the greater part of the information here printed and set forth? And could we not write our own life quite as well as Thomas Jefferson Hogg has written that of Percy Bysshe Shelley? We don't say we should do it well, or even tolerably; but could not we come up to the Hogg standard? Could our regard for ourselves, and our profound esteem for our own merits, exceed that which Hogg entertains for Hogg, and, if words are to be trusted, for Shelley also?

Could we not also enliven our autobiography with memoranda of the sayings and doings of divers personages quite as interesting to the public as those whose talk is here embalmed? Suppose we gave reminiscences of real or imaginary symposia of writers in the Rambler, and made the public our confidant in respect of the very candid opinions on men and things expressed in all the reserve of friendship by the various personages who during the last ten or a dozen years have entertained, instructed, bored, stupefied, or irritated the subscribers who have done us the honour to look over our lucubrations. Would not these things be as worthy of immortal fame as the following, told by Mr. Hogg of himself?

"I was walking, one afternoon in the summer, on the western side of that short street leading from Long Acre to Covent Garden, wherein the passenger is earnestly invited, as a personal favour to the demandant, to proceed straightway to Highgate or to Kentish Town, and which is called, I think, James Street; I was about to enter Covent Garden, when an Irish labourer, whom I met bearing an empty hod, accosted me somewhat roughly, and asked why I had run against him. I told him briefly that he was mistaken. Whether somebody had actually pushed the man; or he sought only to quarrel, and, although he doubtless attended a weekly row regularly, and the week was already drawing to a close, he was unable to wait until Sunday for a broken head, I know not; but he discoursed for a time with the vehemence of a man who considers himself injured or insulted, and he concluded, being emboldened by my long silence, with a cordial invitation just to push him again. Several persons, not very unlike in costume, had gathered round him, and appeared to regard him with sympathy. When he paused, I addressed him slowly and quietly, and it should seem with great gravity, these words, as nearly as I can recollect them:

"I have put my hand into the hamper; I have looked upon the sacred barley; I have eaten out of the drum; I have drunk, and was well pleased; I have said kòyž öμraž, and it is finished!"

'Have you, sir?' inquired the astonished Irishman; and his ragged friends instantly pressed round him with Where is the hainper, Paddy?' 'What barley?' and the like. And the ladies from his own country, that is to say, the basket-women, suddenly began to interrogate him, 'Now, I say, Pat, where have you been drinking? What have you had?'

I turned, therefore, to the right, leaving the astounded neophyte, whom I had thus planted, to expound the mystic words of initiation as he could to his inquisitive companions."

Thus really discourses a gentleman between sixty and seventy years old, and a lawyer to boot, in a book calling itself the Life of Shelley. We open it again just where it chances to unfold itself, and read as follows:

"On circuit and other dull errands, it has been my hard fate too often to lodge with dressmakers or mantua-makers; and I have often wondered when and where the dresses which these females professed to make were really made, since no trace of them ever appeared. Still more have I wondered by what persons such secret mantuas and mantles were worn; whether by sister spectres in churchyards, or by grim hags like themselves at witches' sabbaths.

We entered upon our dim abode immediately,-immediately, that was indispensable; and we procured dinner from an inn; for the weird sisters were above doing any thing useful, or indeed any thing at all, that I could ever discover. The house was dismal and poverty-stricken, and the mistresses of the house were disobliging. I did not make them less so by an ill-timed joke. It was doubtless improper to joke in the presence of two ancient damsels, with whom the sole business of a long life had been to disprove the assertion that life is a jest, and to demonstrate that it is something exquisitely serious and tiresome. I had occasion to go into their private room, a back parlour, and to wait there awhile. It seemed proper to say something to them.

You are dressmakers, I believe.'

Both in unison responded, We are.'

'But where, dear ladies, are the dresses which you make?' They seemed disconcerted at the question, and displeased; and returned no answer.

'I suppose you make dresses for the Invisible Lady;-invisible dresses?'

A little before that time there had been an exhibition which was very popular every where, and particularly so in York. It has long been discontinued, but it was very attractive in its day, and very remarkable; and it has never been distinctly explained how it was managed. The visitor entered a room; from the middle of the ceiling hung, by a silken cord, a balloon of silk about a yard in diameter; it was open at the bottom, and was seen to be quite empty. There were two tubes of brass, terminating in the balloon.

Through one of them the question was proposed in a whisper; by the other the answer of the Invisible Lady was returned.

I once went to see the Invisible Lady, as the phrase was; and having convinced myself by looking into the balloon and moving it about that she was really invisible, I had the temerity to whisper, very gently, Were you ever in love, my dear?' I then placed my ear close to the other tube, and a feminine voice softly whispered back, Never, till I saw you.' The answer containing such an avowal, I had the discretion, notwithstanding the importunities of my companions, to keep to myself."

If the reader asks why we reprint all this rubbish, our excuse is, that but for one or two specimens he would have no conception of the kind of nonsense with which Mr. Hogg has contrived to fill more than a thousand pages with only the first portion of Shelley's brief life. Really we never saw such a shameless affair before. Many are the sins of biographers; but never in the course of our experience did we meet with a man who wrote about himself when pretending to write about somebody else to the extent of Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Chapter after chapter he proses on, in the most flagrant style of penny-a-lining; informing us how once he went to Stonehenge and Winchester, how he slept at a dull inn, where the tea was bad and there was no milk, how &c. &c. &c. all which may be filled up by any body's experience of any thing that happened to him on any day that he did any thing in the world of the most utterly trivial and uninteresting description.

As for the manner in which the "life"-story is put together, the truest account of it is, that it is not put together at all. It has about as much coherence and method as a bundle of bills on a file; and no little of it is about as valuable and instructive as those lively documents. Such information as it contains about Shelley himself is, for the most part, to be picked up, as the reader best may be able, out of hints and suggestions and long series of letters thrust into the text by the head and shoulders. For the unfortunate poet himself Mr. Hogg repeatedly expresses an admiration as nearly boundless as words can make it. He displays himself in a sort of chronic ecstasy of amazement at his manifold genius and singular virtues. In truth, so far as the statements of the biographer go, Shelley was a model of all sanctity and purity, a very type of human nature in perfection, and from first to last a victim of the injustice of his fellow-creatures. Notwithstanding all Mr. Hogg's incense, however, the impression which his volumes leave upon our mind is less favourable both to the intelligence and personal character of the poet than that

which we had hitherto entertained. To judge him from such an idea of his conversation and habits as is to be gathered from a biographer like Mr. Hogg, would be of course unfair. The wisest and wittiest of men would drop down to the level of mediocrity, if his history were told in the diffuse conglomeration of superlatives and declamatory sentences in which we learn, for instance, Shelley's career at Oxford.

But judging Shelley from his own letters, of which there are many in these volumes, we confess that they give but a poor idea of the actual calibre of his understanding and of his powers of expression. Comparing Lord Byron's prose and verse, one can hardly help coming to the conclusion, that every quality which the poems display appears in almost increased vigour in his journals and correspondence. But in Shelley's prose, the deep-seated weakness of his intellect is prominently manifest. Mr. Hogg tells us that he had not a particle of the humorous about him; and considering that he seems to have keenly enjoyed Mr. Hogg's sallies in the way of wit, we can readily believe in this deficiency of his mind without further proof. But that whole faculty which makes a man's language pointed, lively, epigrammatic, and simply forcible; which betrays itself in sensible, or acute, or original, or profound remarks on men and things; which lightens almost every thing it touches on, though with a passing or even a lurid gleam,—all this was wanting in Shelley's understanding to an extent which his poems scarcely show, though they may possibly suggest it. To call his mind a feminine one, would be to pay it far too high a compliment. It was feminine only in what are thought to be the defects of a woman's character. Of the peculiar genius of a true woman's mind he had none. Nobody would take his letters for a woman's for a single instant, though they abound in those qualities which are common to women and men of a certain class of understanding. Vehement, impulsive, rhapsodical, indefinite, and intensely self-satisfied, they present the spectacle of a thoroughly undisciplined and self-indulgent temper, impatient of every thing around it, and utterly ignorant of the small extent of its own capacities and information. Of all the undergraduates now at Oxford or Cambridge, the letters of probably one half the number would be quite as well worth publishing as those here printed, and very many would be far more entertaining to the general reader.

As in his physical temperament, in fact, so in his moral and intellectual, Shelley was singularly wanting in the mas culine element of humanity. He could hardly be called effeminate; for the restlessness of his disposition and the cold

ness of his mere passions preserved him from the debasing life into which many men of his opinions and habits would have sunk. But such as his inclinations were, he appears to have indulged them without a conception that there was any thing inconsistent between his self-love and his ardent aspirations after some fantastic ideal. He was probably, moreover, a man of amiable disposition, and not without a real affectionateness. When it cost him nothing permanent in the way of self-control, too, he could be generous, even at his own cost. But it was all impulsive, headstrong, and wilful; and from the first he does not seem to have had a glimmering of the great duty of man as a responsible being to One who had created him.

Every body knows that he was expelled from Oxford for professed atheism, and Mr. Hogg tells us that his opinions were notorious even at Eton; but Mr. Hogg has such curious notions on deduction, especially for a lawyer, that we hardly know how far he is romancing or exaggerating. "The Quarterly reviewer," he informs us, " telling a story, partly true and partly false, of his destroying some old trees at Eton with a burning-glass, remarks, that you might foresee the future opponent of superstition and tyranny in the author of this exploit. There is great truth," continues Mr. Hogg, "in this observation." Whether any Quarterly reviewer ever did really make so foolish a remark, we cannot tell; but Mr. Hogg certainly endorses the profound truth. Only conceive what a land of young revolutionists in Church and State we must be living in, if every boy that tries to burn old sticks and tease old women with burning-glasses is to be looked upon as a sucking Socrates or Brutus in frock-and-trousers.

The whole attitude of Shelley's mind in respect to the awful question on which he was banished from the University is of the most painful description, only softened by the appearances of something very like insanity, which his whole history exhibits. For a mind, young or old, which is deeply moved by the tremendous problem of human existence, and torn with doubts as to the existence and nature of that God whom it cannot see, but from whom it desires no alienation,— for such a mind our pity is as warin as it is sincere. But Shelley shows no signs of that personal humility which is the becoming attitude of the understanding in the presence of the grand Mystery of the Universe. He treats the question of atheism or belief as if he were a sort of equal of the unknown God. With every desire to make allowances for a person brought up under such disadvantages as those under which he laboured, we cannot be otherwise than shocked at the tone