Plato as Shelley's AudienceAuthor(s): Allan GilbertSource: Modern Language Notes, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Apr., 1954), pp. 253-254Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3040194 .

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SOUTHEY'S BORROWINGS FROM CELIA FIENNES 253

descriptions which both contain of the making of " clap bread " or oaten cakes. Miss Fiennes, with a housekeeper's eye, gives a step- by-step outline of the procedure, which Espriella's account (Letter XLI), with a few details omitted and a few words modernized, follows almost exactly.'3

These borrowings, however, and perhaps a few others that are less obvious, in no way disturb the claim of Southey's work as a highly original production. From Miss Fiennes, in all likelihood, he received no more than he did from living correspondents who provided him with information for similar use.14 But they do illustrate a point which has not until now been sufficiently stressed -that the poet had a detailed knowledge of the contents of the work in his possession and that he recognized its significance long before it actually appeared in print.

NAT LEWIS KADERLY University of Texas

18 Espriella's Letters, p. 231; Journeys, pp.. 193-194. 14 See Simmons's introduction to his edition of Letters from England, pp.

xix-xx. Sotthey's Common-place Book, Second Series, edited by J. W. Warter (London, 1849), also contains two quotations from the Fiennes manuscript: "Precautions against Mining in Dover Castle," p. 343, and "Large double-cropped Strawberry," p. 600. Cf. Journeys, pp. 127, 110.

PLATO AS SHELLEY'S AUDIENCE

In 1820 Shelley wrote to Claire Clairmont:

I am happy that the " Hyperion " and " Prometheus " please you. My verses please so few persons that I make much of the encouragement of the few, whose judgment (if I were to listen to Vanity, the familiar spirit of our race) I should say with Shakespeare and Plato " outweighed a whole theatre of others " (Julian Works 10. 226).

In The Platonism of Shelley, Professor James A. Notopoulos writes that " Shelley probably refers to Republic 476 b, where Plato states that only the minority are able to appreciate the nature of the beautiful" (p. 368).

But it seems that Shelley's syntax is contorted and that he means " whose judgments, like the judgments of Shakespeare and Plato, outweigh a whole theatre of others." If so, he may be referring to the following story:

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254 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, APRIL, 1954

Not even Demosthenes himself can truly say what they report Antimachus Clusius the poet to have said. He was reading to a multitude that had come together that great volume of his you are familiar with, and as he read all left except Plato. Yet he said, ' I shall read on just the same, for to me Plato alone is worth all the rest.' (Cicero, Brutus Li).

Adolf Droop does not list Brutus in Shelley's Belesenheit. The poet's quotation marks, around a passage not literally from the Latin, suggest that he is following a translation; it is not, however, the only one printed in his time, that of E. Jones (1776, reprinted in Bohn's Library and by Harpers).

ALLAN GILBERT Duke University

AN UNPUBLISHED SHELLEY READING LIST

What is apparently an unpublished Shelley reading list is to be found on the thirty-eighth (unnumbered) page of a manuscript listed by the Bodleian Library as MS. Shelley adds. e. 14. On that page, inverted, is the following list:

Aulis gellius Greek Romances Anatomy of Melancholy Chapmans Homer & Hymns Dantes Inferno Purgat & Paradiso by Mary 1

If one can assume that Shelley made this notation during the period in which he wrote The Revolt of Islam, it is not difficult to give an approximate date to the above reading list. Mary Shelley's journal confirms the fact that the poem was finished on Tuesday, September 23, 1817.2 The manuscripts in which the reading list is found contain principally the drafts for the dedication. The first line of the dedication reads: " So now my summer task is ended, Mary "; therefore one might assume that this part of the poem was written last and that the reading list was written during the month of September, 1817. There is, however, another piece

1 Permission to quote from this manuscript has been granted by R. W. Hunt, Keeper of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library.

2 See Mary Shelley's Journal, ed.. Frederick L. Jones (Norman, 1947), p. 84.

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