Mary's story is indebted to Shelley's in other ways as well.
[94] Mathilda.
[95] I cannot find a prototype for this young man, though in some ways he resembles Shelley.
[96] Following this paragraph is an incomplete one which is scored out in the MS.

The comment on the intricacy of modern life is interesting.
Mary wrote: "The world you have just quitted she said is one of doubt & perplexity often of pain & misery--The modes of suffering seem to me to be much multiplied there since I made one of the throng & modern feelings seem to have acquired an intracacy then unknown but now the veil is torn aside--the events that you felt deeply on earth have passed away & you see them in their nakedness all but your knowledge & affections have passed away as a dream you now wonder at the effect trifles had on you and that the events of so passing a scene should have interested you so deeply--You complain, my friends of the" [97] The word is blotted and virtually illegible.
[98] With Diotima's conclusion here cf.

her words in the _Symposium_: "When any one ascending from a correct system of Love, begins to contemplate this supreme beauty, he already touches the consummation of his labour.

For such as discipline themselves upon this system, or are conducted by another beginning to ascend through these transitory objects which are beautiful, towards that which is beauty itself, proceeding as on steps from the love of one form to that of two, and from that of two, to that of all forms which are beautiful; and from beautiful forms to beautiful habits and institutions, and from institutions to beautiful doctrines; until, from the meditation of many doctrines, they arrive at that which is nothing else than the doctrine of the supreme beauty itself, in the knowledge and contemplation of which at length they repose." (Shelley's translation) Love, beauty, and self-knowledge are keywords not only in Plato but in Shelley's thought and poetry, and he was much concerned with the problem of the presence of good and evil.

Some of these themes are discussed by Woodville in _Mathilda_.