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296 CRITICAL STUDIES conduct in this matter. It is, therefore, but just to await their publication before pronouncing a decided judgment." To which we may add that we are at a loss to divine why their publication is delayed so long after the death of Harriet's daughter. We wished to say something on two or three other points, as on the judgment of Lord Eldon depriving Shelley of the custody of his children by Harriet after her suicide (pp. 93, 94), and on the assumption (pp. 182, 183) that his practical career was a failure, an assumption, as we understand it, which we certainly cannot concede ; but space fails us. In conclusion, we have but to state that, in our judgment, Mr. Symonds' book fairly reaches the high-water mark of cultivated and liberal appreciation of Shelley, as poet and as man, in the present time. The ultimate appreciation cannot be yet : for Shelley's fame and influence are still crescent, his cyclic day is still far from its noon ; the poet of the distant future must culminate in the epoch to which he properly belongs. His own lofty words in the " Defence of Poetry " are decidedly applicable to himself, if not to all his illustrious predecessors and contemporaries : " Even in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame ; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers ; it must be impanneled by time from the selectest of the wise of many generations." We may note, by way of postscript, that there are a few slight slips of the pen, which Mr. Symonds might as well correct on revision. Thus, in some of the sentences quoted, our readers will have marked