But Shelley has read Godwin’s _Political Justice_--one of those many fine schemes for the world’s renovation, by tearing out and burning up most of the old furniture, which make their appearance periodically--and in virtue of his admiration of Godwin, Shelley counts him among the demi-gods of the heaven which he has conjured up. In reality Godwin[70] was an oldish, rather clumsy, but astute and clever dissenting minister, who had left preaching, and had not only written _Political Justice_, but novels--among them one called _Caleb Williams_; by which you will know him better--if you know him at all. This gave him great reputation in its time. There were critics who ranked him with, or above, Scott--even in fiction. This may tempt you to read _Caleb Williams_;[71] and if you read it--you will not forget it. It pinches the memory like a vice; much reading of it might, I should think, engender, in one of vivid imagination, such nightmare stories as “_Called Back_” or “_A Dark Day_.” But Mr. Godwin had a daughter, Mary (whose mother was that Mary Wollstonecraft, promoted now to a place amongst famous women), and our Shelley going to see Godwin, saw also the daughter Mary--many times over; and these two--having misty and mystic visions of a new order of ethics--ran away together. It must be said, however, to the credit of Shelley (if credit be the word to use), that when this first wife killed herself--as she did some eighteen months afterward[72] (whether from grief or other cause is doubtful)--he married Miss Godwin; and it was during the summer preceding this second marriage that Byron (1816) encountered Shelley on the shores of Lake Leman. Shelley had already written that wild screed of _Queen Mab_ (privately printed, 1813), giving poetic emphasis to the scepticism of his Oxford days. He had published that dreamy poem of _Alastor_--himself its poet hero, as indeed he was in a large sense of every considerable poem he wrote. I cite a fragment of it, that you may see what waking and beguiling voice belonged to the young bard, who posed there on the Geneva lake beside the more masculine Byron. He has taken us into forest depths: