The volume of essays by the late Mr. Bagehot, recently published, contains one upon Shelley, which deals very clearly and satisfactorily, as far as it goes, with this part of Shelley's work. Mr. Bagehot showed with his usual acuteness how Shelley's philosophy reflected the abnormal peculiarities of his character. He speaks less, however, of certain extraneous influences which must have materially affected Shelley's intellectual developments, and, indeed, seems to have partly overlooked them. He tells us, for example, that Shelley's poems show an 'extreme suspicion of aged persons.' Undoubtedly a youthful enthusiast is apt to be shocked by the dogged conservatism of older men who have been hammered into a more accurate measure of the immovable weight of superincumbent prejudice in the human mind. Shelley could not revolt against things in general without contracting some dislike to the forces against which he inevitably ran his head at starting. Even here, indeed, the charm of Shelley's unworldly simplicity for men of an opposite type, for cynics like Hogg, and Peacock, and Byron, is one of the pleasantest indications of his character. He attracted, and doubtless because he was attracted by, many who had nothing but contempt for his favourite enthusiasms, and it is still more evident that, however wayward was his career in some relations of life, he had a full measure of the young man's capacity for reverence. Dr. Lind seems to have been his earliest idol; but a far more important connection was that with Godwin. Godwin was in his fifty-sixth, and Shelley in his twentieth year, when their correspondence began, and Godwin's most remarkable book was published when Shelley was in the cradle. Young gentlemen of nineteen, even though they belong to the immortals, consider a man of fifty-six to be tottering upon the verge of the grave. Books published before we could spell appear to have been composed before the invention of letters. To Shelley, in short, Godwin was to all intents and purposes a venerable sage, and a fitting embodiment of hoary wisdom. A guide, philosopher, and friend—an oracle who can sanction his aspirations and direct him to the most promising paths—is almost a necessity to every youthful enthusiast; the more necessary in proportion as he has more emphatically broken with the established order. What J. S. Mill was to men who were in their early youth some twenty or thirty years ago, or Newman to young men of different views at a slightly earlier period, that Godwin was to Shelley in the years of his most impetuous speculation. A lad of genius reads old books with eager appetite and learns something from them; but to get the full influence of ideas he must feel that they come from a living mouth, clothed in modern dialect, and applied to the exciting topics of the day. Perhaps neither Mill nor Newman said anything which might not be found implicitly contained in the writings of their spiritual ancestors. Much of Mill is already