I have been reading all the old Shelley literature lately, Hogg and Trelawny and Medwin and Mrs. Shelley, and that terrible piece of analysis, The Real Shelley.  Hogg’s Life of Shelley is an incomparable book; I should put it in the first class of biographies without hesitation.  Of course, it is only a fragment; and much of it is frankly devoted to the sayings and doings of Hogg; it is none the worse for that.  It is an intensely humorous book, in the first place.  There are marvellous episodes in it, splendid extravaganzas like the story of Hogg’s stay in Dublin, where he locked the door of his bedroom for security, and the boy Pat crept through the panel of the door to get his boots and keep them from him, and a man in the room below pushed up a plank in the floor that he might converse, not with Hogg, but with the man in the room above him; there is the anecdote of the little banker who was convinced that Wordsworth was a poet because he had trained himself to write in the dark if he woke up and had an inspiration.  There is the story of the Chevalier D’Arblay, and his departure to France; and the description of his correspondence, in which he said for years that he was inconsolable and suffering inconceivable anguish at being obliged to absent himself from his wife; yet never able to assign any reason for his stay.  Then, too, the whole book is written in the freshest and most crisp style, with a rare zest, that gives the effect of the conversation of an irrepressibly impudent and delightful person.  The picture of Shelley himself is delightfully drawn; it is a perfect mixture of rapturous admiration of Shelley’s fine qualities, with an acute perception of his absurdities.  The picture of Shelley at Oxford, asleep before the fire, toasting his little curly head in the heat, or reading the Iliad by the glow of the embers, seems to bring one nearer to the poet than anything else that is recorded of him.  I cannot think why the book is not more universally known; it seems to me one of the freshest pieces of biography in the language.

Trelawny’s Memorials are interesting, and contain the solemn and memorable scene of the cremation of Shelley’s remains—­one of the most vivid and impressive narratives I know.  Then there are the chapters of Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography which deal with Shelley, a little overwrought perhaps, but real biography for all that, and interesting as bringing out the contrast between the simplicity and generosity of Shelley and the affectation, bad breeding, and unscrupulous selfishness of Byron.  Medwin’s Biography and Mrs. Shelley’s Memorials are worthless, because they attempt to idealise and deify the poet; and then there is The Real Shelley, which is like a tedious legal cross-examination of a highly imaginative and sensitive creature by a shrewd and boisterous barrister.