and treatment) that causes both works to be regarded in later times as 'works of the same school,' Shelley's great poem resembles Byron's great poem. Byron was in no degree accountable either for the 'story' of Shelley's poem, or for its incidents and conceptions of character. The same may be said of the prevailing sentiments, subordinate aims, and main purpose of the poem. Whilst the prevailing sentiments of the poem are altogether foreign to Byron's views on the religious, political, and social questions dealt with in _Laon and Cythna_, his writings are in evidence that he must have regarded Shelley's approval of 'Laon's' incest with his own sister as revolting in the highest degree. But though the substance of this extraordinary poem could not have proceeded from Byron's brain and pen, the form of the work is distinctly Byronic. Shelley cannot have been unconscious of this resemblance of his poem to what was at that time Byron's greatest achievement in song. _Qui s'excuse s'accuse._ The very words of the Preface, in which he anticipates a charge of 'presuming to enter into competition with our greatest contemporary poets,' and, whilst disclaiming the presumption, declares his 'unwillingness to tread in the footsteps of any who preceded him,' are words of evidence that he was fully and uneasily alive to the resemblance. His curious way of accounting for his choice of the measure which Byron's poem had rendered more popular for the moment than any other measure, is only the poet's attempt to shut his eyes to the fact, that he selected the measure because _Childe Harold_ had rendered it more agreeable to his own ear than any other, and had also made it the measure most likely to commend his poem to the public taste. 'I have,' he says, 'adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical harmony than the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but because in the latter, there is no shelter for mediocrity; you must either succeed or fail.' Though Byron doubtless smiled at this reason for the adoption of the measure, which he had in a certain sense made his own, he must have been gratified by the delicate compliment to the poet who had adopted it with success.