SHELLEY wrote a considerable number of essays which were edited by Mrs. Shelley after his death. All of them show the effects of his inclination to metaphysics, which was even stronger than that of Coleridge. His prose is often remarkable, but it does not demonstrate the genius which makes his verse unmistakably the product of one of the greatest lyric poets of modern times. Born in Sussex, England, August 4th, 1792, Shelley was schooled for six years at Eton and then sent to the University of Oxford which expelled him for writing a pamphlet on “The Necessity of Atheism.” In the year of his expulsion, he married Harriet Westbrook, a girl of sixteen, the daughter of a tavern keeper. Three years later he deserted her for Mary Wollstonecraft, whom, after the suicide of his wife in 1816, he married. In 1818 he went with her to Italy and they were living together at Spezia when Shelley was drowned, July 8th, 1822, by the capsizing of the boat in which he and his friend, Edward Williams, were sailing on the bay of Spezia. Shelley’s body was recovered and burned in the presence of Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Trelawney.