I SEND forth these volumes, which have occupied me long,
with a sorrow mingled with the happiness of having brought
my work to a close. At some time, when or where I cannot
now remember, I had expressed my wish to undertake a life
of Shelley. Words which I had forgotten were remembered
by Sir Henry Taylor, and in the summer of 1883 he invited
me, on behalf of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, to consider
whether my wish might not be realized under conditions of
peculiar advantage -- the advantage of access to all the manu-
scripts which form the chief treasures of Boscombe Manor. I
had hoped to place a copy of this "Life of Shelley" in Sir
Henry Taylor's hands, and to have submitted it, with what-
ever of merit and of faults there is in it, to the judgment of
his kindly wisdom. When tidings of his tranquil death
reached me, not certainly my first thought, but one of my
earliest thoughts, was perhaps a selfish one.

No man ever can have had more generous helpers than I
have had in this work. My first thanks are due to Sir Percy
and Lady Shelley. I have had access to all the Shelley papers
in their possession, and permission to make use of them with-
out reserve. The most important of these for a biographer --
setting aside the originals of letters already published in
whole or in part -- is the journal kept in the main by Mary
Shelley, with occasional short intermissions, from the day of
her flight with Shelley to the close of his life; kept also from

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