"thee" for "you," on some rigid system of regulation to which the editor himself does not pretend to suppose that his author ever proposed to conform. Now I cannot but think that a lesser poet than Shelley might reasonably be presumed to know better than his editor what he meant to say, and by what rule or what instinct his hand was guided as he wrote. To me the tact or instinct which even in these small matters directed the hand and determined the choice of Shelley seems so nearly infallible in its exquisite and subtle delicacy, that even if for once my own taste would have rejected the turn of a sentence or a phrase which to his taste has seemed preferable I should undoubtedly consider that he was likelier to be right than I—at least with regard to his own work. Of this readjustment of the words "you" and "thou" six instances are acknowledged and the principle of reformation is vindicated in a note; but for the sentences broken up and recast, the interpolated periods which make two or three curt inharmonious sentences out of one most harmoniously prolonged through natural pauses to its natural end—for these and other vexatious pedantries or petty rigidities of rule, it does not seem that any defence or apology has been thought needful. Yet a skilful and able student or master of language such as Mr. Rossetti cannot surely need to be told that these superfluous breaks and changes in the punctuation deform and destroy the fine perfection of the metre; that the harmony of a whole speech or a whole stanza may be shattered by the intrusion or suppression of a colon or a comma; that a false pointing in English verse is as bad as a false quantity in Latin. There is no