to be found in Locke, and Newman is at times the interpreter of Butler. But then Butler and Locke have been dead for a long time; and what the impatient youth requires is the direct evidence that the ancient principles are still alive and efficient. The old key has probably become rusty, and is more or less obsolete in form. The youth cannot wait to oil and repair it for himself. He wants the last new invention spick and span, and ready to be applied at once to open the obstinate lock. Shelley read Helvetius and Holbach, and Berkeley and Hume; but, though they supplied him with a tolerably modern version of some ancient theories, they could not tell him by anticipation what precise form of argument would best crush Paley, or what specific policy would regenerate Ireland out of hand. For such purposes a young man wants the very last new teacher, and the chances are that he will read even the older philosophers through the spectacles which such a teacher is kind enough to provide. Thus, when looking about in this dark world, given over, as he thought, to antiquated prejudice embodied in cruel injustice, Shelley greeted the writings of Godwin as the lost traveller greets a beacon-fire on a stormy night. They seemed to contain a new gospel. When he discovered the author to be a real human being, not one of the fixed stars that have been already guiding us from the upper firmament, he threw himself at the philosopher's feet with the rapt fervour of a religious neophyte. In his first letters to Godwin he pours out his heart: 'Considering these feelings' (the feelings, namely, of reverence and admiration which he has entertained for the name of Godwin), 'you will not be surprised at the inconceivable emotions with which I learnt your existence and your dwelling. I had enrolled your name in the lists of the honourable dead. I had felt regret that the glory of your being had passed from this earth of ours. It is not so; you still live and, I firmly believe, are still planning the welfare of human kind.' A letter written soon afterwards from Dublin is still more significant. It begins with a kind of invocation, as to a saint. 'Guide thou and direct me,' exclaims the young gentleman; 'in all the weakness of my inconsistencies bear with me; ... when you reprove me, reason speaks; I acquiesce in her decisions.' He presently defends the impatience which Godwin has blamed by an argument which evidently struck even Godwin as having an absurd side. The 'Political Justice,' he says, was first published nearly twenty years before (or almost at the dawn of history!), but yet what has resulted from the general diffusion of its doctrines? 'Have men ceased to fight? Have woe and misery vanished from the earth?' Far from it! Obviously something must be done, and that at once. Do I not well to be impatient, he says, when such reasonable expectations have been so cruelly disappointed?