In the spring of 1809, he bethought himself that he would compete with the artists of prose-fiction, and write a novel that should make him as famous as Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and Mr. Matthew Lewis. If the son of a West Indian planter could in his nonage write a novel so famous, that he was universally styled after its title 'Monk' Lewis, surely 'the heir of a gentleman of large fortune' (as the Etonian described himself in his letter to Messrs. Longman and Co.) might in his nonage produce a romance that should cause him to be talked about as Zastrozzi Shelley. To accomplish this ambition, Shelley went to work on the novel which, certainly begun in Mr. Bethell's house, and talked about before he left the school, was perhaps written to the last line at Eton; though, in consequence of the delays and postponements which usually attend a literary aspirant's first steps to celebrity, it was not published by Messrs. G. Wilkie and J. Robinson, of Paternoster Row, till the summer of 1810, when the author had been for some seven or eight weeks a member of the University of Oxford. Though the idolaters of Shelley's genius have small reason to thank his most voluminous editor for recovering so absurd a performance from the oblivion that covers most of his puerile follies, the poet's biographers, and all who are interested in his story, have cause for gratitude to Mr. Buxton Forman, for reprinting in clear type the ludicrous tale, which enables them to examine the mental stuff and texture of the seventeen years' old boy (sixteen years and nine months old when he began the story, seventeen years and ten months old when he published it) who, fairly forward in Greek, could throw off Latin prose and verse, of more than average goodness, with singular facility. Were it not for _Zastrozzi; a Romance_, by P. B. S. (1810), one would be without evidence that Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet of Free Love, did not leave Eton without conceiving the disregard for the religious sanctions of marriage, which developed into a strong repugnance to the institution, and a cordial disapproval of all the restraints imposed on wedlock by law and custom. Readers seriously bent on knowing the Real Shelley, who has been so artfully and dangerously replaced in these later years by the Fictitious Shelley, will do well to give their best attention to the following summary of the story which reveals so much of the poet's character and disposition, at the moment when he crossed the line that divides boyhood from manhood. ZASTROZZI; A ROMANCE. BY P. B. S.