Page 22, somebody is asked to "clasp with panting soul the
pendulous earth," an image which, we take it, exceeds that of
Shakespeare, to "put a girdle about it in forty minutes."
It is so far a fortunate thing that this piece of impious and utter
absurdity can have little circulation in Britain. The copy in our hands
is one of some score sent to the Author's intimates from Pisa, where it
has been printed in a quarto form "with the types of Didot," and two
learned Epigraphs from Plato and Moschus. Solemn as the subject is, (for
in truth we must grieve for the early death of any youth of literary
ambition,) it is hardly possible to help laughing at the mock solemnity
with which Shelley charges the Quarterly Review for having murdered his
friend with--a critique![N] If criticism killed the disciples of that
school, Shelley would not have been alive to write an Elegy on
another:--but the whole is most farcical from a pen which on other
occasions, has treated of the soul, the body, life and death agreeably
to the opinions, the principles, and the practice of Percy Bysshe
Shelley.
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