On the 12th November, in Florence, the birth of a second son, Percy Florence Shelley, helped Mary out of her sense of bereavement. Subsequent letters still occasionally admit ‘low spirits’. But the entries in the Journal make it clear that the year 1819-20 was one of the most pleasantly industrious of her life. Not Dante only, but a motley series of books, great and small, ancient and modern, English and foreign, bespoke her attention. Not content with Latin, and the extemporized translations which Shelley could give her of Plato’s _Republic_, she started Greek in 1820, and soon came to delight in it. And again she thought of original composition. ‘Write’, ‘work,’—the words now occur daily in her Journal. These must mainly refer to the long historical novel, which she had planned, as early as 1819,[6] under the title of _Castruccio_, _Prince of Lucca_, and which was not published until 1823, as _Valperga_. It was indeed a laborious task. The novel ‘illustrative of the manners of the Middle Ages in Italy’ had to be ‘raked out of fifty old books’, as Shelley said.[7] But heavy as the undertaking must have been, it certainly did not engross all the activities of Shelley’s wife in this period. And it seems highly probable that the two little mythological dramas which we here publish belong to this same year 1820. The evidence for this date is as follows. Shelley’s lyrics, which these dramas include, were published by his wife (_Posthumous Poems_, 1824) among the ‘poems written in 1820’. Another composition, in blank verse, curiously similar to Mary’s own work, entitled _Orpheus_, has been allotted by Dr. Garnett (_Relics of Shelley_, 1862) to the same category.[8] Again, it may well be more than a coincidence, that the Proserpine motive occurs in that passage from Dante’s _Purgatorio_, canto 28, on ‘Matilda gathering flowers’, which Shelley is known to have translated shortly before Medwin’s visit in the late autumn of 1820. O come, that I may hear Thy song: like Proserpine, in Enna’s glen, Thou seemest to my fancy,—singing here, And gathering flowers, as that fair maiden, when She lost the spring and Ceres her more dear.[9] But we have a far more important, because a direct, testimony in a manuscript addition made by Thomas Medwin in the margin of a copy of his _Life of Shelley_ (1847).[10] The passage is clearly intended—though chronology is no more than any other exact science the ‘forte’ of that most tantalizing of biographers—to refer to the year 1820.