Gisborne's quite Slawkenbergian nose as a thing that, weighing upon the beholder's imagination, and transforming all its owner's g's into k's, was a feature scarcely to be forgiven by Christian charity, Shelley observed, '_I, you know, have a little turn-up nose_; Hogg has a large hook one; but add them together, square them, cube them, you would have but a faint notion of the nose to which I refer.' Shelley having written in this way of the defective shape and size of a principal feature of his face, it is not surprising that, whilst avoiding such words as 'unsymmetrical' and 'irregular,' Lady Shelley admitted reluctantly in her _Shelley Memorials_, that the poet's 'features were not _positively_ handsome.' The wonder is that, after making this admission in the text, the lady told a different story in the frontispiece of her book. The evidence is superabundant that, instead of being positively handsome, Shelley's little nose was positively tip-tilted, and his face positively unsymmetrical. To see the real Shelley, as he appeared during life to persons who regarded him through no such disturbing medium as romantic glamour, it is needful to get the better of misconceptions, arising from the delusive portraitures of him, to be found in familiar biographies--the fanciful pictures, which are the more intolerable for being fruitful of misapprehensions respecting the poet's moral endowments. The epithet applied to the delusive portraitures, was chosen with deliberation. 'Fanciful' in effect, they had their origin in fancy, and may be fairly described as the offspring of fancy working upon fancy, at different times and under various conditions. Shelley never sate to a professional painter. From the year that produced the Indian-ink sketch of a young gentleman, wearing the scant gown and leading bands of an Oxford undergraduate, to the year of his death, Shelley never gave a competent painter an opportunity for producing a work, that would have prevented the fanciful misrepresentations from gaining any credit--possibly would even have prevented them from coming into existence. It would have been better for his readers, and certainly no worse for his fame, had he never consented to sit to an amateur. But it was fated that the man, who suffered so much in more important matters from sterner adversaries, should suffer considerably from two dabblers in the fine arts. At Rome (Lady Shelley says in 1818, Trelawny says in 1819) Miss Curran began the portrait in oil, which she never finished, of the poet in his twenty-eighth year--the sketch which, dropped and relinquished by the fair limner, possibly because she felt she had made 'a bad beginning,' was destined to be the chief source of all the artistic falsities, that have been manufactured to his injury since his death. Trelawny says this failure was 'left in an altogether flat and inanimate state'--a description to be kept in mind.