The poet, who, on the eve of Daniel Hill’s arrest in Barnstaple, wrote to Mr. Thomas Hookham, ‘a poem is safe; the iron-souled Attorney-General would scarcely dare to attack,’ had made considerable additions to his knowledge of the law touching seditious and heterodox publications, and the publication of printed papers, since those words were penned. Daniel Hill’s punishment ‘for publishing and dispersing printed papers without the printer’s name being on them,’ had taught Daniel Hill’s master a lesson he took to heart. If Shelley pressed Mr. Hookham to put himself before the world as the publisher of the poem, the bookseller declined to afford the Attorney-General an opportunity for showing the degree of audacity Shelley had declared impossible even in a Crown lawyer. It may be assumed that Shelley had inquired in vain for a competent printer, brave enough to print openly what no publisher would publish, before he relinquished his design of publishing the poem, and decided to produce the book for private circulation under a false imprint. Anyhow, an edition (of 250 copies) of the book (which Mr. Moxon was prosecuted for re-publishing seven-and-twenty years later) was printed by some unknown printer at some undiscovered press in the spring of 1813, with an untruth on its title-page, and a repetition of the untruth on the concluding leaf. As criticism of Shelley’s poetry does not fall within the scope of the present work, I am silent respecting the poetical merits of _Queen Mab_; but it is incumbent on the poet’s biographer to say something of two of the lengthy notes appended to the performance,--notes so little known to the admirers of Shelley’s verse, that it may be questioned whether one out of every hundred persons who have read the poem attentively has ever glanced at the notes. The Anti-matrimonial Note and the Atheistical Note should be perused by all readers who would know The Real Shelley; the former being studied in connexion with the circumstances that resulted in his abandonment of his first wife; and the latter being studied in connexion with the evidence that, instead of being a mere syllabus of reasonings put together for the convenience of scholastic disputants (as Hogg and Lady Shelley declare it to have been), or the mere squib (which Mr. Garnett would have us think it), _The Necessity of Atheism_ was a serious exposition of certain of the author’s views on matters pertaining to religion.