Using the Byronic measure (for the Spenserian measure had become for the moment Byron's property), Shelley made a Byronic use of matter taken from romances devoured in his childhood. 'Treading in the footsteps' of his master, notwithstanding his assertions to the contrary, Shelley followed the Byronic example in attaching his own personality to the hero of his poem. Not content with hinting poetically in the Dedicatory Stanzas to Mary that he and Laon are one, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ is at pains to declare more fully and precisely in the prose of his Preface that Laon's views on matters of religion and politics, on questions of government and misgovernment, on the vices of ecclesiasticism and the merits of vegetarianism, on the relations of the sexes and the æsthetics of love, are the views of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., who has studied human nature in Switzerland as well as England, and who, in consideration of his 'having trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc,' should be regarded as a gentleman especially educated and peculiarly qualified to dogmatize on such matters to English persons who have never crossed the Channel. Both in the poem and dedicatory prelude he seizes every opportunity to impress on the reader that Percy Bysshe Shelley is Laon, the apostle of 'Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,' and that this Preacher of the 'New Evangel,' who at the close of the poem sails into Paradise with his sister and the offspring of their incestuous intercourse in a boat made of 'one curved shell of hollow pearl, Almost translucent with the light divine Of her within,' is no other than Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., eldest son of the Member of Parliament for New Shoreham, and heir-apparent to a Sussex baronetcy. In these Shelleyan egotisms the critical reader of the marvellous poem recognizes the very touch and trick of Byron's way of dressing up details of his domestic woes and personal story for the delight and mystification of his readers. One of the most pathetic and effective of the egotisms is the poet's account of the misery he endured from hard-hearted masters and malicious boys whilst he was at school. Just as Byron seasoned the introductory stanzas of _Childe Harold's_ first canto with more or less imaginary particulars of his misspent youth, when 'Few earthly things found favour in his sight, Save concubines and carnal companie, And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree,' Shelley seasoned the dedicatory verses of _Laon and Cythna_ with references to the wretchedness that preyed upon him when, walking forth upon the glittering grass, he wept and 'knew not why; until there rose From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas! Were but one echo from a world of woes-- The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.'