a conscientious survey of original sources before fashioning her story of mediaeval Italy, and she is hampered by the exuberance of her knowledge.  The novel is not a romance of terror; but Castruccio, though his character is sketched from authentic documents, seems towards the end of the story to resemble the picturesque villain who numbered among his ancestry Milton’s Satan.  He has “a majestic figure and a countenance beautiful but sad, and tarnished by the expression of pride that animated it.”  Beatrice, the gifted prophetess who falls deep in love with Castruccio, ends her days in the dungeons of the Inquisition.  Mrs. Shelley’s aim, however, is not to arouse fear, but to trace the gradual deterioration of Castruccio’s character from an open-hearted youth to a crafty tyrant.  The blunt remarks of Godwin, who revised the manuscript, are not unjust, but fall with an ill grace from the pen of the author of St. Leon:  “It appears in reading, that the first rule you prescribed was:  ’I will let it be long.’  It contains the quantity of four volumes of Waverley.  No hard blow was ever hit with a woodsaw."[121]

In The Last Man, which appeared in 1825, Mrs. Shelley attempted a stupendous theme, no less then a picture of the devastation of the human race by plague and pestilence.  She casts her imagination forward into the twenty-first century, when the last king of England has abdicated the throne and a republic is established.  Very wisely, she narrows the interest by concentrating on the pathetic fate of a group of friends who are among the last survivors, and the story becomes an idealised record of her own sufferings.  The description of the loneliness of the bereft has a personal note, and reminds us of her journal, where she expresses the sorrow of being herself the last survivor, and of feeling like a “cloud from which the light of sunset has passed."[122] Raymond, who dies in an attempt to place the standard of Greece in Stamboul, is a portrait of Byron; and Adrian, the late king’s son, who finally becomes Protector, is clearly modelled on Shelley.  Yet in spite of these personal reminiscences, their characters lack distinctness.  Idris, Clara and Perdita are faintly etched, but Evadne, the Greek artist, who cherishes a passion for Raymond, and dies fighting against the Turks, has more colour and body than the other women, though she is somewhat theatrical.  Mrs. Shelley conveys emotion more faithfully than character, and the overwrought sensibilities and dark forebodings of the diminished party of survivors who leave England to distract their minds by foreign travel are artfully suggested.  The leaping, gesticulating figure, whom their jaded nerves and morbid fancy transform into a phantom, is a delirious ballet-dancer; and the Black Spectre, mistaken for Death Incarnate, proves only to be a plague-stricken noble, who lurks near the party for the sake of human society.  These “reasonable” solutions of the apparently