What consequences ensued from young Medwin's accidental discovery of this fragment amongst the litter of the London bookstall! The finder of the scrap carried it to Shelley, Shelley carried it to Byron; and both poets were powerfully affected, permanently influenced by it. It gave Byron the thought of the lines in _Manfred_. 'I have affronted death--but in the war Of elements the water shrunk from me, And fatal things pass'd harmless--the cold hand Of an all-pitiless demon held me back, Back by a single hair, which would not break. In fantasy, imagination, all The affluence of my soul--which one day was A Croesus in creation--I plunged deep, But, like an ebbing wave, it dash'd me back Into the gulf of my unfathom'd thought. I plunged amidst mankind--Forgetfulness I sought in all, save where 'tis to be found, And that I have to learn--my sciences, My long pursued and super-human art, Is mortal here--I dwell in my despair-- And live--and live for ever.' So strongly held to his last hour was Shelley by the thought which came to him, through the scrap of dirty paper taken with worthless stuff from a bookstall, that whilst Ahasuerus appears once and again in his own character and personality in the poet's works, the reader of those works comes no less often on cursory references to the undying wanderer, and on lines that would never have been penned, had it not been for Shelley's deep and frequent ponderings of the hideous doom of deathlessness, accorded to the supreme sinner of Christian romance. Ahasuerus the Jew figures in _Queen Mab_ (1812-13) and _Hellas_ (1821); he was in the poet's mind when he meditated the lines of _Alastor_ (1815)-- 'O, that God, Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice Which but one living man has drained, who now, Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels No proud exemption in the blighting curse He bears, over the world wanders for ever, Lone as incarnate death!' Shelley's subsequent misconception of the way in which the tragic fragment came into his possession, may be regarded as one of the trivial consequences, though by no means the least curious consequence, of the degree in which the fragment possessed his fancy. As there is no evidence that the author of _Queen Mab_ was in London shortly before the time when the fragment first came under his eyes, and much evidence that he was away from London throughout the certain period, covering the uncertain day on which the fragment was picked up at the bookstall, there is no reason on the score of Medwin's peculiar mental infirmity to question the accuracy of his precise statement that he was the finder of the transcript, which he describes as 'not a separate publication,' but a thing that 'mixed up with the works of some German poet' seemed to have been 'copied ... from a magazine of the day.' The words of Medwin's precise averment touching this matter are--