"_August._--I have been re-reading what I said regarding my rejected Shelley article, and I see that you might possibly interpret my language as referring to its _merit_. This would make my words read arrogantly in the extreme. When I said that I knew nothing just like it in the language, I was speaking of its _kind_, its style. As to the _merit_ of that style, I have ventured no opinion of my own, but simply given you my friends' opinion. I am so poor a judge of my own work, that they never pay any attention to what I think about it. Please always bear this in mind. You may be sure that in speaking about my own work I always follow the same rule, to tell you merely what my friends say as to its merit."
What little more remains to be told of the writing and the posthumous publication of the Shelley article comes from W. M.:--
"It happened that Bishop (afterwards Cardinal) Vaughan, who knew the poet's family well in Lancashire, and had known Francis himself at Ushaw, met him in London at our house, and out of this meeting and the Bishop's wish to serve him, came the suggestion that he should contribute a paper to the _Dublin Review_. That venerable quarterly, founded by Cardinal Wiseman half a century before, Bishop Vaughan now owned but did not edit. It inherited ecclesiastical rather than literary traditions; and a due consideration for these dictated the opening passages of the Essay, since somewhat curtailed. Hence proceeded the plea that Theology and Literature might be reconciled--just such another reconciliation as Art had been adjured to seal with Nature at the end of the eighteenth century:
Go find her, kiss her, and be friends again!
And Thompson's plea had this added relevance--that the choice of a subject, left to himself, had fallen upon Shelley; perhaps a dubious choice. At any rate the article was returned to him from the _Dublin_--one more of those memorable rejections that go into the treasury of all neglected writers' consolations, perhaps their illusions. Thrown aside by its discouraged author, the Essay[18] was found among his papers after his death. His literary executor thought it right that the Review for which it was originally designed should again have the offer of it, since a new generation of readers had arisen, and another editor, in days otherwise regenerate. Thus it happened that this orphan among Essays entered at last on a full inheritance of fame."