Proserpine and Midas

oems 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 year 1820.

II.

For indeed there is more than a personal interest attached to these writings of Mrs. Shelley's. The fact that the same mind which had revelled, a few years earlier, in the fantastical horrors of Frankenstein's abortive creation, could now dwell on the melancholy fate of Proserpine or the humorous disappointment of Midas, and delight in their subtle poetical or moral symbolism--this fact h