From his boyhood to his last year, Shelley regarded Byron with a generous admiration, that once and again expressed itself in almost idolatrous language. Unlike the Shelleyan fanatics, who seek to exalt their favourite by decrying the only modern English poet likely to be rated as his superior, Shelley ever regarded Byron as the greatest living master of their art. Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Keats, Tom Moore, Leigh Hunt, to say nothing of minor minstrels, all had a share of Shelley's never-stinted homage, but he never for any long time thought of putting the best and strongest of them on equality with the incomparable Byron. To remember the terms in which he wrote and spoke of Byron, is to think with a smile of all that has been written in these later years by poetasters and critics to Byron's discredit. The enthusiasts, who have so clear a perception of the signs of Shelley's influence over Byron in the Third Canto of _Childe Harold_, are curiously blind to the far more important and conspicuous indications of Byron's influence on Shelley in _Laon and Cythna_. When the most has been said of the manifestations of Shelleyan thought in Byron's poem, it cannot be questioned that had the younger of the two poets never lived, the four Cantos of _Childe Harold_ would have been substantially the same poem they now are. On the other hand, it is impossible for any one but a Shelleyan enthusiast to believe that _Laon and Cythna_ would have been the same poem it now is, had Byron never come into existence. Written in the summer of 1817, when the poet had been for five years, like all the younger poets of his time, living under the domination of Byron's intellect, and had been for a still longer period an enthusiastic admirer of Byron's writings; written in the summer following the one in which the still youthful aspirant to poetical renown had come under the personal influence of the great poet, whom he had so long desired to know personally, and had made at least one futile attempt to approach, _Laon and Cythna_ bears the most distinct marks of Byron's influence in Shelley's selection of the Spenserian measure, in the poem's Byronic egotisms, and in the pains taken by the poet to identify himself with the hero of the narrative. In all these particulars (to say nothing of other particulars which the reader of these pages can discover for himself), _Laon and Cythna_ resembles _Childe Harold_, just as the painting by a young artist, abounding in originality and natural vigour, is often seen to resemble the painting of an older artist, whose notions and treatment of colour, and whose manipulatory address, have been a manifest force in the aspirant's education. Just as the painting of the younger artist in form and colour, without being either 'a copy,' or even 'an imitation,' in any dishonourable sense of the term, bears to the painting of the master a certain resemblance (of tone