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192

NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHELLEY.

recruits, and with such arms, as the "paramour"[1] of Dante's Church, who begot on the body of that bride no less hopeful and helpful an offspring than the Holy Inquisition. Such workings of the creed, such developments of the faith, were before Shelley's eyes when he wrote; he had also about him the reek of as foul an incense going up from the priests of that day to their Ferdinand or their George as those of ours have ever sent up to Bonaparte or to Bourbon of their own, mixing with the smell of battle-smoke and blood the more fetid fumes of prayer and praise; and wide as is the gap between his first and his last manner, great as is the leap from "Queen Mab" to "Hellas," the passage of five years had not transformed or worn out the "philanthropist, democrat, and atheist" of 1816. For thus he signed himself in the Swiss album, not merely as ; and the cause or provocation is clear enough; for on the same leaf there appears just above his signature an entry by some one who saw fit here to give vent to an outbreak of overflowing foolery, flagrant and fervid with the godly grease and rancid religion of a conventicle; some folly about the Alps, God, glory, beneficence, witness of nature to this or that divine thing or person, and such-like matter. A little below is the name of Shelley, with this verse attached:—

"εὶμὶ φιλάνθρωπος ἂημωκρἀτικός τ´ ἂθεός τε."

I copy the spelling with all due regret and horror, but not without rejoicing on his account that Shelley was clear of Eton when he committed this verse, and had

  1. "L'amoroso drudo
    Della fede cristiana."Paradiso, xii. 55.
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