The excellence of Shelley's best poems, which appears to advantage in a selection of this size, is hard to exaggerate. But for a hundred years after he died almost everything about him was exaggerated. 

His life, his death and his work were described in all the ways a protean century liked to see itself, and often they were drawn in flattering distortions which are not our style of flattery. 

Still, it is hard to know how to describe such people realistically; they themselves could not:

We will each write a ghost story, said Lord Byron, and his proposition was eagerly acceded to. . . . 

On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. 

I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night of November. ... (Preface to Franken- stein, Mrs. Shelley.)

Mary Shelley was not quite nineteen that evening on the shore of Lake Leman, where they had recently journeyed so that her step-sister, sixteen, could continue an affair with Lord Byron, the oldest man in the room at twenty-eight.

Shelley, who had fathered four children and lost one, would soon be twenty-four.