Excerpt from The Prose Works, Vol. 1 of 4: Of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Translations and Fragments issued by Mrs. Shelley in 1840; but not one of Shelley's own prose publications was reissued in that collection, unless we reckon as his the History of a Sale Weeks' Tour, in which he certainly took a very active part. While bringing that posthumous collection and his own publications together, I have also included every essay or fragment of an essay known to me as having been published in any of the numerous books about Shelley: I have been fortunate enough to obtain a good deal that was unpublished and, although it has been no part of the scheme to make a complete collection of Shelley's Letters, it will be seen that the Sixty-eight given by Mrs. Shelley have grown to a hundred and twenty-seven, -twenty-one letters written in the years preceding Shelley's final departure from England in 1818, and a hundred and six Letters from Italy. The greater part of the additional letters are from outlying sources: they include nearly all the scattered letters of Shelley given in lives of the poet and books and articles about him but the great mass of letters in Hogg's Life of Shelley has not been drawn upon at all, the book being accessible and the letters mainly of biographical Tether than literary interest; and the letters in the Shelley Memmials, a stereotyped book of high authority in good circulation, have not been incorporated, as they of course Should be in a collection of Shelley's miscellaneous letters.

Before each Work or Section in these volumes will be found, in a note, such particulars as to history and biblio graphy as seem essential; but a consideration of these prose writings in the mass and seriatim has suggested a few additional observations which may more fitly be made in a Preface to the first collected edition of Shelley's Prose Works, - an edition embodying, it is believed, all his prose essays of any importance which are extant.

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