again very beautifully and characteristically Shelley writes to another correspondent, "Facts are not what we want to know in poetry, in history, in the lives of individual men, in satire, or panegyric. They are the mere divisions, the arbitrary points on which we hang, and to which we refer those delicate and evanescent hues of mind, which language delights and instructs us in precise proportion as it expresses." Byron declares that from the moment he could read, his grand passion was history, and there will be found in his Life by Moore a remarkable extract from a memorandum book of 1807, in which Byron sets down a list of the historical writers whose works he had perused; the list occupies more than two pages, and includes histories of England, Scotland, Ireland, Rome, Greece, France, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Russia, Sweden, Prussia, Germany, Italy, Hindostan, America.* "The greater part of these,' Byron adds, "I perused before the age of fifteen.” Shelley was about to reform the world, but empirical knowledge, experience, was not needed for the task; the gross stuff of society was to be penetrated by the purifying flame of an idea, and all its grossness was to be burnt away.

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Godwin (again I quote from Mr Leslie Stephen) represents the tendency of the revolutionary school towards the deification of the pure intellect;

'sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must alway be victorious over error; sound

The "List of Books read by Shelley and Mary in 1817" (Shelley Memorials, end of chap. vii.) supplies materials for an interesting contrast.

reasoning and truth are capable of being so communicated; truth is omnipotent; the vices and moral weaknesses of men are not invincible; man is perfectible, or in other words, susceptible of perpetual improvement.' What is this but the Revolt of Islam put into intellectual formulæ ? In Shelley's poem, indeed, written at a time when the Revolution seemed to have temporarily failed, and when the forces of reaction were strong, the power of error is more justly estimated; yet if evil should triumph, it can be but for a season; the moment must arrive, when before the breath of some pure prophet or prophetess, all the piledup wrongs of the earth must go down and dissolve. In the "Prometheus ages must pass away before the tyrant falls, and the deliverer is unbound; but the day of rejoicing is certain, even if it be far off, and in the end it will come with sudden glory. "The worst of criminals might be reformed by reasoning such was Godwin's happy conviction. Shelley differs only as a poet must differ from a philosopher-he assigns a larger share in such possible reformation to the emotions, and the action upon the heart of ideals of justice and charity. "To hate a murderer is as unreasonable as to hate his weapon "-so thought Godwin; and Shelley poetizes the doctrine when Laon bids the tyrant Othman go free. To account for the prevalence of error, Godwin "sets up a dark power of imposture which fights and has hitherto fought with singular success, against the power of truth. Kings and priests represent the incarnation of evil." The Zeus by whose order Prometheus is chained to the rock is this

dark Power of imposture, he is also named the Anarch Custom; it is he who has authorized the superstitions and the tyrannies of the world. "We can scarcely hesitate," wrote Godwin, "to conclude universally that law is an institution of the most pernicious tendency." And with Shelley law is everywhere at odds with love, and in a reign of love it must at last disappear. As to the marriage bond, Godwin is merely uncertain whether the future unions of the sexes will be by promiscuous intercourse, or alliances terminable at the pleasure of

either party. * Shelley exhibits in his original "Laon and Cythna," and his "Rosalind and Helen," the beauty of free love, and the miseries and degrading slavery of unions where no love exists or which are protracted after love has ceased.

All the illusions of the Revolu

tion, many of them generous illusions,-perfectibility, disregard of tradition and inheritance, the contrast between a benevolent Nature and the selfishness of Society, are to be found in full vigour in Shelley. Also all that was admirable and noble, all that was of a constructive character in the Revolution is to be found-its enthusiasm of humanity, its passion for justice, its recognition of a moral element in politics, its sentiment of the brotherhood of men.

It was an unfortunate circumstance that the movement party in England, and England's poets of progress, remained separated by a great gulf. spirit in English thought during the

The questioning early part of the

Leslie Stephen: English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii. p. 275.

+ On this point Shelley in later years learned to correct his error.

C

present century-Jeremy Bentham-was (perhaps not excepting Hobbes) the hardest-headed of all questioning spirits, and his followers cut off the right hand of sensibility and put out the right eye of imagination, if by any means they might enter into the heaven of Utilitarianism, and have share in the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Mr Mill described in his Autobiography the spirit which animated the first propagators of Philosophic Radicalism. On their banner was inscribed a strange device—the population principle of Malthus. In politics they were possessed by "an almost unbounded confidence in the efficacy of two things, representative government and complete freedom of discussion." Aristocratic rule was the object of their sternest disapprobation; "an established Church or corporation of priests, as being by position the great depravers of religion, and interested in opposing the progress of the human mind," was, next after aristocracy, the most detestable of things. "Some of us," Mr Mill goes on, "for a time really hoped and aspired to be a 'school.' The French philosophes of the eighteenth century were the examples we sought to imitate."

Here were several particulars offering points of connexion with such poetry as that of Shelley, and Mr Mill was himself endowed with a fine feeling for literature. But something was wanting. My zeal," says Mr Mill, "was, as yet, little else, at that period of my life, than zeal for speculative opinions. It had not its root in genuine benevolence or sympathy with mankind, though these qualities held their due place in my ethical standard. Nor was it connected with any high enthusi

asm for ideal nobleness. Yet of this feeling I was imaginatively very susceptible; but there was at that time an intermission of its natural aliment, poetical culture, while there was a superabundance of the discipline antagonistic to it, that of mere logic and analysis." All poetry had been pronounced by Bentham to be misrepresentation. Among the liberals of that time, it was the spiritual liberals, Maurice and Sterling, with others disciples of Coleridge-who best appreciated the uses of the imagination and the "understanding heart." No one who has read Mr Mill's Autobiography can forget the remarkable chapter in which he describes the spiritual dryness and dejection in which his habit of analysis and his unqualified Benthamism for a time resulted, nor how, in large measure through the influence of poetry-the poetry of Wordsworth,-he recovered his sanity and his energy of will. Afterwards, while still highly estimating Wordsworth's poetry, he came to understand Shelley, and assigned to him an unique place among English poets, as possessor of the artistic temperament in its purest, typical form.

The European poetry of England began and ended. with Byron and Shelley. While the Revolution of 1830 proved that the spirit of 1789 was still living and acting on the Continent of Europe, while that movement assisted in giving a new direction to the rising Romantic school in France, and was hailed by Heine with pyrotechnic display of delighted epigrams, England, the weary Titan, was considering her corn laws and her Reform Bill. In France, new government, new literatures, new religions, new political utopias, Saint-Simon,