ABSTRACT
This epigram, which was incorporated into L&C (IX xxxvi 5–8), is found in S.’s draft for that passage (Nbk 3 f. 134), and in a transcript by Mary S. (Harvard MS Eng.258.3) to which she gave the present title. She never printed her transcript, which was in a notebook given to Claire Clairmont, and it remained unpublished until 1925. Although S. identified the source of his pencil draft, in ink, as ‘Apuleius’, perhaps intending a footnote reference in L&C, the epigram is excluded from modern editions of Apuleius’s Apologia X 24. S. probably read it in a copy of Apuleius’s Works after finishing the same author’s Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) in May 1817 (Mary Jnl i 169–70). On 3 August S. told Hunt: ‘I have arrived at the 380th stanza of my Poem’ (L i 551): by his numbering in Nbk 3 this was stanza xxix of Canto X, so assuming an overall composition-rate of 3 stanzas per day, the place of the epigram could have been reached about the last week in July. Edward A. Silsbee, who acquired the notebook from Claire Clairmont in Florence, noted below the transcript: ‘Shelley came in from his study & showed them this. They were delighted-C[laire] remembers it-’. This may have happened at any time from mid-May. The Hunts were at Albion House until 25 June, and Hogg was in Marlow 26–31 July; otherwise ‘they’ must simply mean Mary S. and Claire herself. The metrical irregularity in the L&C text clearly derives from the draft in Nbk 3 (see note below), while the corrections made to the draft suggest that the Harvard transcript preserves S.’s final version. In both L&C and Harvard S. much elaborated the original Greek (see Webb, The Violet in the Crucible (Oxford 1976) 133): https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315837123/7779541d-dc6c-4d7f-af85-040be7e42686/content/fig140_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
