In the superabundance of his veneration for every line written, and every scrap of paper known to have been touched by the poet, Mr. Buxton Forman, is educating the English people to regard _Zastrozzi_ as a performance that, instead of being perused lightly and laughed over merrily, should be studied with due regard to the various readings of its two different editions,--the original edition of 1810, and the reprint of 1839, in _The Romancist and Novelist's Library_. Wherever those editions differ by an inverted comma, a mark of punctuation, a dropt letter, or a letter too many, Mr. Buxton Forman calls attention to the difference, as though each trivial diversity of the two texts were a matter of high importance. Believing that delicate meanings may be found in the poet's occasional slips of spelling, Mr. Forman calls attention to the remarkable fact, that the word 'ceiling' in the reprint is spelt 'cieling' in the original edition; the no less curious and significant circumstance that the word 'escritoire' of the later edition is spelt _escrutoire_ in the edition that passed straight to the world from the author's own hand and eye. In like manner we are invited to notice the difference of a perfectly formed 's' between the 'mishapen' of Shelley's own text, and the 'misshapen' of the reprint. Mr. Forman calls attention to an even bolder departure from the original text in the reprint, which may well be regarded with suspicion and mistrust by the Shelleyan specialists. Whilst the original edition contains the sentence, 'The most horrible scheme of vengeance at at this instant glances across Zastrozzi's mind,' the editor of the 1839 edition has the daring (not altogether innocent of irreverence) to omit the second 'at.' From the standpoint and principles of an editor, who regards Shelley as a being who might have been the Saviour of the World, Mr. Buxton Forman is of course right in attaching great importance to these differences of the two editions, of an almost sacred performance. But to the profane mind of the present writer, who, instead of thinking Shelley in any respect comparable with the Saviour of the World, and conceives him to have been a rather foolish schoolboy in the earlier months of 1809, a very foolish Oxford undergraduate in the later months of 1810, and a still more foolish undergraduate in the earlier months of 1811, it appears that these differences of the two editions of _Zastrozzi_ are of no more importance than the proverbial difference between 'tweedledum' and 'tweedledee.' It is, however, interesting to observe how the hero of the puerile novel corresponds with the hero of _Laon and Cythna_,--to observe also how Shelley (holding to crudities and fantastic fancies, which any other man of similar strength would have hurled to his soul's rubbish-bin), reproduces in the great poem some of the subordinate details of the immature romance.