rather than of a psychologist. One has to create one's own portrait of Shelley out of the facts he has brought together. One is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of Shelley--a student to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition of Shelley's letters as well as for the biography--referring to Shelley again and again as "Bysshe." Shelley's family, it may be admitted, called him "Bysshe." But never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet who brought down music from heaven. At the same time, as we read his biography over again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehow express two incongruous aspects of the man. In his life he was, to a great extent, Bysshe; in his poetry he was Shelley. Shelley wrote _The Skylark_ and _Pan_ and _The West Wind_. It was Bysshe who imagined that a fat old woman in a train had infected him with incurable elephantiasis. Mr. Ingpen quotes Peacock's account of this characteristic illusion: He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to swell to the size of an elephant's, and his skin was to be crumpled over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands arms, and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any deviation from smoothness, he would seize the person next to him and endeavour, by a corresponding pressure, to see if any corresponding deviation existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of lightning. Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however ludicrous. After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however, one has to read _Prometheus_ again in order to recall that divine song of a freed spirit, the incarnation of which we call Shelley. (2) THE EXPERIMENTALIST