P. 177, col. 2, 1. 5.

CHORUS.

The final chorus is indistinct and obscure as the event of the living drama whose arrival it foretells. Prophecies of wars, and rumours of wars, &c. may safely be made by poet or prophet in any age; but to anticipate, however darkly, a period of regeneration and happiness, is a more hazardous exercise of the faculty which bards possess or feign. It will remind the reader, "magno nec proximus intervallo" of Isaiah and Virgil, whose ardent spirits, overleaping the actual reign of evil which we endure and bewail, already saw the possible and perhaps approaching state of society in which the "lion shall lie down with the lamb," and "omnis feret omnia tellus." Let these great names be my authority and excuse.

P. 177, col. 2, 1, 35.

Saturn and Love their long repose. Saturn and Love were among the deities of a real or imaginary state of innocence and happiness. All those who fell, or the Gods of Greece, Asia, and Egypt;

the One, who rose, or Jesus Christ, at whose appearance the idols of the Pagan world were amerced of their worship; and the many unsubdued, or the monstrous objects of the idolatry of China, India, and the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America, certainly have reigned over the understandings of men in conjunction or in succession, during periods in which all we know of evil has been in a state of portentous, and, until the revival of learning and the arts, perpetually increasing activity. The Grecian Gods seem indeed to have been personally more innocent, although it cannot be said that, as far as temperance and chastity are concerned, they gave so edifying an example as their successor. The sublime human character of Jesus Christ was deformed by an imputed identification with a power, who tempted, betrayed, and punished the innocent beings who were called into existence by his sole will; and for the period of a thousand years, the spirit of this most just, wise, and benevolent of men, has been propitiated with myriads of hecatombs of those who approached the nearest to his innocence and wisdom, sacrificed under every aggravation of atrocity and variety of torture. The horrors of the Mexican, the Peruvian, and the Indian superstitions are well known.

NOTE ON HELLAS

THE South of Europe was in a state of great political excitement at the beginning of the year 1821. The Spanish Revolution had been a signal to Italy-secret societies were formed-and when Naples rose to declare the Constitution, the call was responded to from Brundusium to the foot of the Alps. To crush these attempts to obtain liberty, early in 1821, the Austrians poured their armies into the Peninsula at first their coming rather seemed to add energy and resolution to a people long enslaved. The Piedmontese asserted their freedom; Genoa threw off the yoke of the King of Sardinia; and, as if in playful imitation, the people of the little state of Massa and Carrara gave the congé to their sovereign and set up a republic.

Tuscany alone was perfectly tranquil. It was said, that the Austrian minister presented a list of sixty Carbonari to the grand-duke, urging their imprisonment; and the grand-duke replied, "I do not know whether these sixty men are Carbonari, but I know if I imprison them, I shall directly have sixty thousand start up." But though the Tuscans had no desire to disturb the paternal government, beneath whose shelter they slumbered, they regarded the progress of the various Italian revolutions with intense interest, and hatred for the Austrian was warn in every

BY THE EDITOR.

bosom. But they had slender hopes; they knew that the Neapolitans would offer no fit resistance to the regular German troops, and that the overthrow of the Constitution in Naples would act as a decisive blow against all struggles for liberty in Italy.

We have seen the rise and progress of reform. But the Holy Alliance was alive and active in those days, and few could dream of the peaceful triumph of liberty. It seemed then that the armed assertion of freedom in the south of Europe was the only hope of the liberals, as, if it prevailed, the nations of the north would imitate the example. Happily the reverse has proved the fact. The countries accustomed to the exercise of the privileges of freemen, to a limited extent, have extended, and are extending these limits. Freedom and knowledge have now a chance of proceeding hand in hand; and if it continue thus, we may hope for the durability of both. Then, as I have said, in 1821, Shelley, as well as every other lover of liberty, looked upon the struggles in Spain and Italy as decisive of the destinies of the world, probably for centuries to come. The interest he took in the progress of affairs was intense. When Genoa declared itself free, his hopes were at their highest. Day after day, he read the bulletins of the Austrian

army, and sought eagerly to gather tokens of its defeat. He heard of the revolt of Genoa with emotions of transport. His whole heart and soul were in the triumph of their cause. We were living at Pisa at that time; and several well-informed Italians, at the head of whom we may place the celebrated Vaccá, were accustomed to seek for sympathy in their hopes from Shelley: they did not find such for the despair they too generally experienced, founded on contempt for their southern countrymen.

While the fate of the progress of the Austrian armies then invading Naples was yet in suspense, the news of another revolution filled him with exultation. We had formed the acquaintance at Pisa of several Constantinopolitan Greeks, of the family of Prince Caradja, formerly Hospodar of Wallachia, who, hearing that the bowstring, the accustomed finale of his viceroyalty, was on the road to him, escaped with his treasures, and took up his abode in Tuscany. Among these was the gentleman to whom the drama of Hellas is dedicated. Prince Mavrocordato was warmed by those aspirations for the independence of his country, which filled the hearts of many of his countrymen. He often intimated the possibility of an insurrection in Greece; but we had no idea of its being so near at hand, when, on the 1st of April, 1821, he called on Shelley; bringing the proclamation of his cousin, Prince Ipsilanti, and, radiant with exultation and delight, declared that henceforth Greece would be free.

their general, not their particular purport. He did not foresee the death of Lord Londonderry, which was to be the epoch of a change in English politics, particularly as regarded foreign affairs; nor that the navy of his country would fight for instead of against the Greeks; and by the battle of Navarino secure their enfranchisement from the Turks. Almost against reason, as it appeared to him, he resolved to believe that Greece would prove triumphant ; and in this spirit, auguring ultimate good, yet grieving over the vicissitudes to be endured in the interval, he composed his drama. The chronological order to be observed in the arrangement of the remaining poems, is interrupted here, that his dramas may follow each other consecutively. "Hellas" was among the last of his compositions, and is among the most beautiful. The choruses are singularly imaginative, and melodious in their versification. There are some stanzas that beautifully exemplify Shelley's peculiar style; as, for instance, the assertion of the intellectual empire which must be for ever the inheritance of the country of Homer, Sophocles, and Plato:

Shelley had hymned the dawn of liberty in Spain and Naples, in two odes, dictated by the warmest enthusiasm ;-he felt himself aaturally impelled to decorate with poetry the uprise of the descendants of that people, whose works he regarded with deep admiration; and to adopt the vaticinatory character in prophesying their success. "Hellas" was written in a moment of enthusiasm. It is curious to remark how well he overcomes the difficulty of forming a drama out of such scant materials. His prophecies, indeed, came true in

But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war;
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.

And again, that philosophical truth, felicitously imaged forth

Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind,
The foul cubs like their parents are;
Their den is in the guilty mind,

And conscience feeds them with despair.
The conclusion of the last chorus is among the
most beautiful of his lyrics; the imagery is dis-
tinct and majestic; the prophecy, such as poets
love to dwell upon, the regeneration of mankind—
and that regeneration reflecting back splendour
on the foregone time, from which it inherits so
much of intellectual wealth, and memory of past
virtuous deeds, as must render the possession of
happiness and peace of tenfold value.

END OF HELLAS,

ACT I.

What! ye who grub With filthy snouts my red potatoes up In Allan's rushy bog? Who eat the oats Up, from my cavalry in the Hebrides? Who swill the hog-wash soup my cooks digest From bones, and rags, and scraps of shoe-leather, Which should be given to cleaner Pigs than you?

See Universal History for an account of the number of people who died, and the immense consumption of garlic by the wretched Egyptians, who made a sepulchre for the name as well as the bodies of their tyrants.

Out with your knife, old Moses, and spay those sows,
[The Pigs run about in consternation.

That load the earth with pigs; cut close and deep.
Moral restraint I see has no effect,
Nor prostitution, nor our own example,
Starvation, typhus-fever, war, nor prison-
This was the art which the arch-priest of Famine
Hinted at in his charge to the Theban clergy-
Cut close and deep, good Moses.

MOSES.

Keep the boars quiet, else—

SWELLFOOT.

PURGANAX.

Oh, would that this were all ! The oracle!

MAMMON.

Why it was I who spoke that oracle,
And whether I was dead drunk or inspired,
I cannot well remember; nor, in truth,
The oracle itself!

PURGANAX.

The words went thus :-
"Boeotia, choose reform or civil war!
When through the streets, instead of hare with
dogs,

A Consort Queen shall hunt a King with hogs,
Riding on the Ionian Minotaur.”

MAMMON.

Now if the oracle had ne'er foretold
This sad alternative, it must arrive,
Or not, and so it must now that it has ;
Let your Majesty And whether I was urged by grace divine,
Or Lesbian liquor to declare these words,
Which must, as all words must, be false or true;
It matters not for the same power made all,
Oracle, wine, and me and you-or none-
"Tis the same thing. If you knew as much
Of oracles as I do

Zephaniah, cut That fat hog's throat, the brute seems overfed; Seditious hunks! to whine for want of grains.

PURGANAX.

You arch-priests

Believe in nothing; if you were to dream
Of a particular number in the lottery,
You would not buy the ticket!

MAMMON.

Yet our tickets
Are seldom blanks. But what steps have you taken?
For prophecies, when once they get abroad,
Like liars who tell the truth to serve their ends,
Or hypocrites, who, from assuming virtue,
Do the same actions that the virtuous do,
Contrive their own fulfilment. This Iona-
Well-you know what the chaste Pasiphae did,
Wife to that most religious King of Crete,
And still how popular the tale is here;

And these dull swine of Thebes boast their descent
From the free Minotaur. You know they still
Call themselves bulls, though thus degenerate;
And everything relating to a bull

Is popular and respectable in Thebes:
Their arms are seven bulls in a field gules.
They think their strength consists in eating beef,-
Now there were danger in the precedent
If Queen Iona-

PURGANAX.

I have taken good care

That shall not be. I struck the crust o' the earth
With this enchanted rod, and Hell lay bare!
And from a cavern full of ugly shapes,

I chose a LEECH, a GADFLY, and a RAT
The gadfly was the same which Juno sent
To agitate Io,* and which Ezechielt mentions
That the Lord whistled for out of the mountains
Of utmost Ethiopia, to torment
Mesopotamian Babylon. The beast

*The Prometheus Bound of Eschylus.

And the Lord whistled for the gadfly out of Ethiopia, and for the bee out of Egypt, &c.--EZECHIEL.