not of intellect, not of moral purpose, not of passion, but of feelings and of imagination. Hence often the discrepancy between his words and his actions; hence the unreality of his philosophy; hence the unjust judgments of friends, the incorrect estimates of religion. Hence, too, the power and the limitations of his genius. In judging him we must not claim for him intellectual power which he did not possess; we must not claim for him high morality, for he was without the defence and protection of a moral nature and moral principles ; his real claim for praise is that his imagination though often extravagant was never depraved-though often attracted by the horrible was never attracted by the impure; it was set on high and lofty ideals; and that in following out its commands, though constantly liable to mistakes in judgment, though constantly erring through haste and impetuosity, he was capable of great self-sacrifice and was even culpably regardless of his own interests.

Shelley had all the merits of generous aspirations and feelings, but he was singularly deficient in self-control. He refused to submit to any restraints or undergo any discipline. Just as he never allowed himself to realize the conditions of life, so he never made himself conform to them. He was undisciplined in his life and his character, undisciplined in his thoughts and poetry. His mental power was great, but it was immature, for it had never been educated. He was guided entirely by his impulses; his impulses were often high and lofty, but they had never been controlled. He was eager in his pursuit after learning, but he would only learn what would please him, and in the way he liked. He was full of generosity; he was capable of great self-sacrifice. He would give up his boots to a beggar he met on the road. He would deprive himself of many comforts in order to help his friends. Godwin alone must have received from him 7,000l. or 8,000l. But his generosity often took the form of putting his name to bills he could not meet-of incurring debts which his father had to pay. In one case certainly his failure to meet a bill ruined a man. He was full of ideals about love; his feelings were genuine, but his impetuosity and want of selfrestraint led to continued acts of injustice. And so in small things. He was continually making experiments in diet; often he would refuse or neglect to eat his food until he was faint with fasting; often he would devour voraciously (in order to save time) unwholesome vegetable diet. Then when outraged Nature took her revenge, he suffered acute agonies and was obliged to have recourse to laudanum.

He was

never an opium eater; he never contracted a habit like De Quincey, but he at times almost killed himself by a reckless indulgence. And this discipline which he refused to submit to himself he believed to be absolutely injurious to others. It was not from any immoral desires that he attacked marriage. It was because it was a restraint; it therefore checked the harmonious and natural development of mankind. It was as an attack upon what he thought an evil custom that he introduced those parts of Laon and Cythna which were naturally repulsive. And in harmony with this was his view of nature. The world was not to him a great ordered whole, moving according to fixed laws; he had read much science, but he had never learnt the great lesson of science. It was a divine being, and all its parts were divine. He is not using merely the language of poetry when he addresses the skylark—

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.'

He looked upon the world as a great whole of spiritual beings bound together, not by law, but by love, and all the harmony of the universe was the result, not of a divine will and system, but of a perfect and harmonious agreement between the different portions. Nature represented the reign of love, not law; and when man has substituted love for law then universal happiness will prevail. Even the moon by love will once more feel the joys of life :

'Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow,
And living shapes upon my bosom move :

Music is in the sea and air,

Winged clouds soar here and there,

Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of:
'Tis love, all love!'

We cannot exaggerate, and we feel ourselves unable to praise, the beauty of the panegyric on Love in the last act of Prometheus. But Shelley's own life was the best criticism on his philosophy; if love will make all it gazes on paradise, human nature requires the discipline of law and morality to make it fit for the reign of love.

There are two men whose lives were closely mingled with that of Shelley, and whose characters present the most instructive contrasts. William Godwin professed to be a

philosopher, and certainly succeeded in showing how contemptible philosophy could be. He had written against marriage and the aristocracy, but he was particularly careful that his daughter should be married when there was some chance of her becoming a baronet's wife. He for long refused to speak to Mary; he would not bring himself to write the name of her seducer, but he never hesitated to borrow money from him. We have seldom read anything more mean and contemptible than his letters to Shelley. The more he received from his son-in-law the more his embarrassment seems to become, and the greater his ingratiWhen at length Shelley expostulates on his extravagance he describes the letter as scurrilous, and gives continual unhappiness to his daughter by venomous attacks on her husband.

name.

"I return your cheque,' wrote Godwin, because no consideration can induce me to utter a cheque drawn by you and containing my To what purpose make a disclosure of this kind to your banker? I hope you will send a duplicate by the post which will reach me on Saturday morning. You may make it payable to Joseph Hume or James Martin, or any other name in the whole directory' (Dowden, i. 538).

We have seldom read a more insulting or pretentious letter. Shelley always considered Godwin his master in philosophy, and certainly he exhibits the results of a philosophy based on principles of pure love in a far more pleasing light.

Again, between Byron and Shelley there were many resemblances and great contrasts. Both were men with all the impediments to becoming respectable citizens that genius so often creates; both had scandalized the world by their immoral life; both found themselves half banished from their country, and looked at with at least suspicion by all they met; both were men of brilliant powers and irregular habits; but in every other way they were extraordinarily different. Byron had enjoyed all the applause and fame of a successful poet; he had the advantage of great wealth and social position, and he had become cynical, discontented, a sneerer and a scoffer. Shelley had never known popularity, he had never received anything but abuse and contempt, and had never lost faith in his fellow-men. We picture the two in their life together in Italy: Byron, selfindulgent, ostentatious, ashamed of his intellectual powers, always anxious to be thought a man of the world, surrounding himself with a mob of retainers, prodigal and mean; Shelley, equally extravagant, but extravagant in generosity, full of in

tellectual zeal, eager and keen about the works he read, a devoted student, a quiet gentleman. Byron's illegitimate child, Allegra, was supported for years by Shelley, and banished by her father to a convent. Her mother was treated by him with the contempt a child feels for a plaything he has got tired of, and lived chiefly upon Shelley. Shelley always announced himself an atheist, and obeyed most of the Christian precepts. Byron rather prided himself on preserving some relics of the faith, but never obeyed any of its commandments. The contrast between the two poets is the best evidence of their characters. The one pure-minded, elevated in thought, simple and unconscious, if wild, irregular, impetuous in his acts; the other sensual and degraded, always attracted by the impure, full of conscious egotism and vanity, ashamed of his powers, and playing the part of a melodramatic hero. His highest merit is perhaps that he recognized and was not ashamed to confess the moral superiority of his brother poet.

Shelley was notorious in his own day as an atheist; he was never tired of asserting that he was one. There was probably no one who less represents what is implied generally by that name. We do not wish to analyse his creed more than we have done, for a philosophical abstract of the views of a poet is of little value. But if an atheist is one who refuses to recognize spiritual principles; if he is one who looks upon the world as matter and nothing but matter; if he is one whose beliefs are bounded by his senses, and his aspirations by his desire to justify them, Shelley was certainly no atheist. We will go further: we believe that the popularity of his poems among certain persons is an unconscious protest against the atheism they profess. After looking upon the world as a dark, gloomy material process; after being told that the latest dictate of science is that man may believe in force and in matter, and nothing more, they find themselves suddenly plunged by a poet, who professes like them to be an atheist, into a world of spiritual life, where love reigns and not force, where everything is spiritual, not material, where they are taught a beauty they had never seen, and are introduced to a world they had never realized. Shelley's world is as much a figment of the imagination as the materialist's is of the senses. But the imagination has its work as well as the reason; we have heard of the dangers of its misuse: we must not neglect its proper functions; it is the ally of the spiritual power. It helps man to break through the strong bonds of sense and to see beyond the narrow horizon that bounds their

vision. And this we believe is a work which the poetry of Shelley-however inadequate his philosophy may be--can do and has done.

So much for Shelley's claims to be an atheist. His attitude towards Christianity is equally instructive. In his notes to Queen Mab, he informed the world, in an airy and lighthearted manner, that he had found reason to believe that the Founder of Christianity was a clever impostor. Shortly afterwards he read the Gospel narrative, and from that time forward his opinion changed, and he adopted a view which has since become part of the cant of cultivated free-thought, that the character of the Founder of Christianity was beautiful and worthy of imitation, but it was not Christianity. But his hatred was then transferred to historic Christianity. It is an interesting comment upon this fact that he absolutely refused to read history, asserting that it contained only a record of the crimes and blunders of the human race-committed, of course, all by tyrants and Christians. We sincerely ask persons who are in the habit of talking about honest convictions held by the impulse of reason, the result of careful study, and so on, whether the unorthodoxy of opinion which they defend is not very often the result of a refusal to be convinced. If a man deliberately asserts that historic Christianity has been disastrous to mankind, and absolutely refuses to take the only means of testing the question, does he not at once stand condemned of a certain guiltiness in holding the opinions which he does hold? Will not this suggest that after all a man is, at any rate to a certain extent, responsible for the opinions he holds? We will not dwell more on this, but will return to the views of Shelley. There is no doubt that they entered to a certain extent into the composition of the Prometheus, but it is equally certain that had the Prometheus been written six or eight years earlier, the colourless Jupiter, who merely represents evil religion, evil laws, evil customs, would have been replaced by a very different character. But the reading of Dante and gradual acquaintance with some of the facts of history, the contrast of Christian Europe and Mohammedan Greece, began to operate, and we find a great advance in breadth of view in the Hellas. referring to the well-known Chorus of that poem, we are quite aware, as the notes inform us, that it is only dramatic; but to a lyric poet of the intensely subjective character of Shelley the capacity to grasp such a dramatic standpoint implies an immense intellectual advance. It is because we believe that this Chorus represents the very highest point to which Shelley

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