There is no evidence that Mr. Finerty was, or ever had been, the editor of the _Statesman_. There are no grounds for thinking he ever had been the editor of that paper. Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy admits he has no reason to think Mr. Finerty ever was editor of the _Statesman_. Yet he insists that this spurious letter (genuine epistle as he thinks), dated 22nd February, 1811, to the Editor of the _Statesman_, must have been addressed to a man (who was _not_ that paper's editor), _because_ it contains a reference to the imprisonment of some person in terms quite as applicable to an imprisoned journalist who _had never been_, as to an imprisoned journalist _who had been or was_ editor of that paper. Nothing in the letter to the Editor of the _Statesman_ implies that the imprisoned journalist had been in any way connected with the paper, or that the writer of the letter believed the imprisoned journalist to have been connected with the paper. Yet Mr. MacCarthy is at great pains to show how the Oxonian Shelley may have come to imagine that the cruelly entreated Mr. Finerty was editor of the paper, with which he in fact is not known to have had any professional connexion. The libel on Lord Castlereagh, for which Mr. Finerty was sent to prison, having been published in the _Statesman_ as well as the _Morning Chronicle_, it was natural for Shelley (argues Mr. MacCarthy) to assume that Mr. Finerty was editor of the _Statesman_. Shelley was by no means such a fool as the 'Shelleyan enthusiasts' would have us think him. The youngster reasoned wildly sometimes, but he was not likely to think a journalist must be the editor of one paper because he had been sent to prison for libelling a Minister in another paper. Knowing well enough that Mr. Finerty (in whose concerns he took a lively interest) had been committed for eighteen months to Lincoln Gaol on 7th February, 1811, Shelley was not likely to imagine a fortnight later he was the Acting Editor of the London _Statesman_. Knowing right well Mr. Finerty had been sentenced to _eighteen months_, Shelley was not likely so soon after the sentence to imagine the journalist had been sent to prison for _two years_. To read Mr. MacCarthy's perplexing pages is to see that the gentleman was not more successful in confounding his readers than in confounding himself. Yet because he threw a new kind of mud on Shelley's earliest biographer, this superlatively inaccurate and stupefying writer has been cried up as a great Shelleyan authority. After setting forth the words of the spurious epistle, Mr. MacCarthy remarks in his usual style of laborious inaccuracy:-- 'This letter, whatever its claim to authenticity may be, is dated February 22nd, 1811. Six days later--_that is_, on the 2nd of March in the same year--Shelley addressed, for the first time, another newspaper editor then personally unknown to him, but who became a few years later one of his most valued and intimate friends--Leigh Hunt.'