The evidence is not even conclusive that Shelley had a serious intention to produce a poem for Mr. Finerty's advantage. He may have put forth the advertisements to whip up the public interest in the movement for the unfortunate journalist's benefit. Evidence so weak can only be used conjecturally. I am disposed to regard the advertisements as _bonâ-fide_ advertisements, and to think they referred to some poem published by Shelley for the alleged object. The author may also have published the poem with an eye to his own advantage; may have hoped to use the excitement of a political stir as a means of floating into circulation a poem, which, in case it succeeded, the 'Gentleman of the University of Oxford' could claim in his own name. He had been for some time thinking of publishing a satirical poem. 'I am,' he wrote to Hogg from Field Place, on 20th December, 1810, 'composing a _satirical_ poem. I shall print it at Oxford, unless I find, on visiting him, that R. is ripe for printing whatever will sell. In case of that, he is my man.' There is evidence (though of a doubtful quality) that he wrote the first sketches for a poem, which eventually took shape in _Queen Mab_, in the summer of 1810. Much of that poem would answer to the title of _A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things_. Shelley put so many fictions into his earlier letters to Godwin, that the reader, who is not a 'Shelleyan enthusiast,' hesitates to trust any statement of those highly imaginative epistles, that is not supported by another witness. But he may have been writing truth at Keswick on 16th January, 1812, when he wrote of himself as the author of the _Essay on Love_, a little poem. This 'little poem,' if it was ever written, may have been the same poem as the _Political Essay on the Existing State of Things_, if the latter was ever written. Were it announced to-morrow on good authority that a copy had been recovered of the poem by Shelley, for a copy of which Mr. MacCarthy made so vain a search, I should expect to learn that the poem, published for Mr. Finerty's benefit, proved to be poetry that was subsequently worked into _Queen Mab_. If the _Poetical Essay_ (of March and April, 1811) contained some of the more violent and outrageous passages of _Queen Mab_, the same considerations that caused the poet's Oxford bookseller to destroy all the copies of _The Necessity of Atheism_, that were in his hands, would determine him to destroy at the same time all the copies of the _Poetical Essay_ lying in his premises. II. What evidence does MacCarthy produce that Shelley was a contributor of poetry and of prose articles of literary subjects to the _Oxford Herald_, whilst he was an Oxford undergraduate?