If Trelawny's evidence may be accepted, Clint did his work to the satisfaction of 'the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life.' As Trelawny was one of those few, the 'composition' may be assumed to have had his approval. But Trelawny knew nothing of pictures, and little of the poet with whose story he will be associated to the end of time. The whole term of their friendly intercourse exceeded six months by no more than two or three days. And throughout that term the Cornish gentleman, with his simple reverence for literature and men of letters, regarded the poet through the glamour that makes things seem other than they are. On being shown the portrait for the first time, with an assurance that people approved it, Trelawny was not the man to discover anything wrong in it. When he saw it for the first time, a considerable number of long years had elapsed since the death of his acquaintance for six short months. Under these circumstances, Trelawny's good word goes for nothing in the estimate of the spurious performance. That Hogg resembled Peacock in rating the picture at its proper worthlessness is matter of certainty; for though an engraving of the artistic imposture faces the title-page of his first volume, the biographer shows himself fully alive to the fictitious nature of the composition, by his vivid and minute verbal portraitures of the poet at Oxford and in later stages of his career. Since Trelawny published Vinter's lithograph of the picture as a frontispiece to the _Recollections_ (1858), numerous engravings have appeared on wood, stone, or metal, of the posthumous 'composition' which the Cornish gentleman, at the time of his book's appearance, regarded as the only reliable painting of the poet. 'The water-colour drawing has been lost,' Trelawny wrote in 1858, 'so the portrait done by Clint is the only one of any value.' At that time he was far from imagining that the oil-sketch, which Miss Curran 'never finished, and left in an altogether flat and inanimate state,' would ever compete in public confidence with the posthumous 'composition.' To the present writer it has not seemed worth the while to inquire what (if anything) was done to Miss Curran's 'failure,' to bring it out of the 'altogether flat and inanimate state,' and put it into a condition to be regarded (_on the authority_ of words spoken by Sir Percy Shelley, _on the authority_ of his mother) as the 'best portrait extant' of the poet. It is enough for the present writer and his readers to know that Miss Curran's beginning of a portrait has risen to this place in Sir Percy's esteem--to know that it rose eventually to an equally high place in Mary Godwin Shelley's esteem--to know from Lady Shelley's assurance that the frontispiece of the third edition of her _Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources_, is an engraving from (to use her ladyship's words) 'the original picture by Miss Curran, painted at