gentle radiant forms, From custom's evil taint exempt and pure; Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, Looking emotions once they feared to feel. Thrones, altars, judgment seats, and prisons are to be abolished when reason is absolute; and when The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself. To be 'unclassed, tribeless, and nationless', and we may add, without marriage, is to be in the lowest depths of barbarism. It is so, at least, in the world of realities. But the description will fit that 'state of nature' of which philosophers of the time delighted to talk. The best comment is to be found in Godwin. The great mistake of Rousseau, says that writer, was that whilst truly recognising government to be the source of all evil, he chose to praise the state which preceded government, instead of the state which, we may hope, will succeed its abolition. When we are perfect, we shall get rid of all laws of every kind, and thus, in some sense, the ultimate goal of all progress is to attain precisely to that state of nature which Rousseau regretted as a thing of the past and which is described in Shelley's glowing rhetoric. The difficulty of making this view coherent is curiously reflected in the mechanism of Shelley's great poem; great it is, for the marvel of its lyrical excellence is fortunately independent of the conceptions of life and human nature which it is intended to set forth. If all the complex organisation which has slowly evolved itself in the course of history, the expression of which is civilisation, order, coherence, and co-operation in the different departments of life, is to be set down as an unmitigated evil, the fruit of downright imposture, all history becomes unintelligible. Man, potentially perfectible, has always been the sport of what seems to be a malignant and dark power of utterly inexplicable origin and character. Shelley, we are told, could not bear to read history. The explanation offered is that he was too much shocked by the perpetual record of misery, tyranny, and crime. A man who can see nothing else in history is obviously a very inefficient historian. Godwin tells us that he had learnt from Swift's bitter misanthropy the truth that all political institutions are hopelessly corrupt. A fusion of the satirist's view, that all which is is bad, with the enthusiast's view, that all which will be will be perfect, just expresses Shelley's peculiar mixture of optimism and pessimism. When we try to translate this into a philosophical view or a poetical representation of the world, the consequence is inevitably perplexing.