[Footnote: Dr. Garnett, in his prefatory note, states that Orpheus 'exists only in a transcript by Mrs. Shelley, who has written in playful allusion to her toils as amanuensis _Aspetto fin che il diluvio cala, ed allora cerco di posare argine alle sue parole_'. The poem is thus supposed to have been Shelley's attempt at improvisation, if not indeed a translation from the Italian of the 'improvvisatore' Sgricci. The Shelleys do not seem to have come to know and hear Sgricci before the end of December 1820. The Italian note after all has no very clear import. And Dr. Garnett in 1905 inclined to the view that Orpheus was the work not of Shelley, but of his wife. A comparison of that fragment and the dramas here published seems to me to suggest the same conclusion, though in both cases Mary Shelley must have been helped by her husband.] Again, it may well be more than a coincidence, that the Proserpine motive occurs in that passage from Dante's Purgatorio, canto 28, on 'Matilda gathering flowers', which Shelley is known to have translated shortly before Medwin's visit in the late autumn of 1820.

O come, that I may hear Thy song: like Proserpine, in Enna's glen, Thou seemest to my fancy,--singing here, And gathering flowers, as that fair maiden, when She lost the spring and Ceres her more dear. [Footnote: As published by Medwin, 1834 and 1847.]

But we have a far more important, because a direct, testimony in a manuscript addition made by Thomas Medwin in the margin of a copy of his Life of Shelley (1847). [Footnote: The copy, 2 vols., was sold at Sotheby's on the 6th December 1906: Mr. H. Buxton Forman (who was, I think, the buyer) published the contents in _The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, By Thomas Medwin, A New Edition printed from a copy copiously amended and extended by the Author_ . . . Milford, 1913. The passage here quoted appears on p. 27 of the 2nd vol. of the 1847 edition (Forman ed., p. 252)] The passage is clearly intended--though chronology is no more than any other exact science the 'forte' of that most tantalizing of biographers--to refer to the year 1820.

'Mrs. Shelley had at this time been writing some little Dramas on classical subjects, one of which was the Rape of Proserpine, a very graceful composition which she has never published. Shelley contributed to this the exquisite fable of Arethusa and the Invocation to Ceres.--Among the Nymphs gathering flowers on Enna were two whom she called Ino and Uno, names which I remember in the Dialogue were irresistibly ludicrous. She also wrote one on Midas, into which were introduced by Shelley, in the Contest between Pan and Apollo, the Sublime Effusion of the latter, and Pan's characterised Ode.'

This statement of Medwin finally settles the question. The 'friend' at whose request, Mrs. Shelley says, [Footnote: The Hymns of Pan and Apollo were first published by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems, 1824, with a note saying that they had been 'written at the request of a friend to be inserted in a drama on the subject of Midas'. Arethusa appeared in the same volume, dated 'Pisa, 1820'. Proserpine's song was not published before the first collected edition of 1839.] the lyrics were written by her husband, was herself. And she was the author of the dramas. [Footnote: Not E.