And if, two years later, when this harshly reviewed poet was already dead, the same curious inquirer had applied to the publisher for information as to the saleableness of the fiercely attacked works, the latter would quite certainly have complained of them as a bad business speculation, and told his questioner that, during Shelley's lifetime, not a hundred copies of any of his works, except _Queen Mab_ and _The Cenci_, had been sold, and that, as far as _Adonais_ and _Epipsychidion_ were concerned, ten would be nearer the number. If any one were to ask now: Who was Shelley? what a different answer would be given! But to-day there is no one in England who would ask. It was on the 4th of August 1792 that England's greatest lyric poet was born. On the same day on which, in Paris, the leaders of the Revolution--Santerre, Camille Desmoulins, and others--were meeting in a house on the Boulevards to make the arrangements which resulted, a few days later, in the fall of monarchy in France, there came into the world at Field Place, in the English county of Sussex, a pretty little boy with deep blue eyes, whose life was to be of greater and more enduring significance in the emancipation of the human mind than all that happened in France in August 1792. Not quite thirty years later his name--Percy Bysshe Shelley--was carved upon the stone in the Protestant cemetery in Rome under which his ashes lie; and below the name are engraved the words: _Cor cordium_. _Cor cordium_, heart of hearts--such was the simple inscription in which Shelley's young wife summed up his character; and they are the truest, profoundest words she could have chosen. [Illustration: P. B. SHELLEY]