In making this distinction between poetry of a masculine and that of a feminine order, it must be understood that no sort of disrespect is intended to the latter in saying a good word for that “once important sex” of poetry which the bewitching allurements of Keats and Shelley and their followers have caused, for a season, to be comparatively despised. The femininity of such poets as these is a glorious and immortal gift, such as no mortal lady has ever attained or ever will attain. It has been proved to us how well a mortal lady may become able to read the classics; but, humbled as some of us may feel by her having headed the Tripos, it is still some compensation for those of our sex to remember that we alone can write “classics,” even of the feminine order. Nor let it be thought that we have been insisting upon a modern and fanciful distinction in thus dividing great men into two classes, in one of which the masculine and in the other the feminine predominates. It is a fact the observation of which is as old as the mythology which attributed the parentage of heroes in whom the intellectual powers prevailed to the union of gods with women, while those who distinguished themselves by more external and showy faculties were said to have been born of the commerce of goddesses with men. XIV WHAT SHELLEY WAS Professor Dowden has had access to a very large quantity of hitherto unpublished correspondence and other matter, some of which throws much new light upon Shelley’s singular character; and, but for one most important point--his sudden separation from Harriet Westbrook, for which no substantial reason is given--the Professor’s eleven hundred closely printed pages contain all and more than all that any reasonable person can want to know about the subject. Professor Dowden’s arrangement of this mass of material is so lucid that interest seldom flags; and the whole work reads like a first-class sensational novel, of which the only faults are that the characters are unnatural and the incidents improbable. A beautiful youth of almost superhuman genius, sensitiveness, and self-abnegation, is the hero. He is given early to blaspheming whatever society has hitherto respected; and to cursing the King and his father--an old gentleman whose chief foible seems to have been attachment to the Church of England. His charity is so angelical that he remains on the best of terms with one man who has tried to seduce his wife, and with another--a beautiful young lord with a club-foot, whom he finds wallowing in a society given to vices which cannot be named, and who is also a supreme poet--notwithstanding the fact that this lord has had a child by one of the ladies of his (the hero’s) wife’s family and treats her with the most unmerited contempt and cruelty. He adores three really respectable and attractive young ladies--by name Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, and Emilia Viviani--with a passion which eternity cannot exhaust, and praises them