His friend, Shelley, went so far in the same direction as to call himself a republican, as well as an atheist. His life was pure in his own eyes; but his opinions about divorce were punished by a decision in Chancery that he was unfit to be trusted with his own children. He had consecrated himself in boyhood to war against all oppressors; and his position to the last was that of his own Prometheus, suffering continually with the enslaved, but consoled by faith that his sympathy will hasten the glorious day when every man shall be "king over himself," when women, free "from custom's evil taint," shall make earth like heaven, when "thrones, altars, judgment-seats, and prisons" shall seem as antiquated as the pyramids, and when human nature shall be "its own divine control." He took the side of the poor against the rich in a drama which was suppressed on account of its severity against George IV., and which ends with a portentous scene, where "Freedom calls Famine, her eternal foe, To brief alliance." He spoke as well as wrote for the independence of Ireland; and he would have done much for that of Greece, if he had not died soon after publishing a magnificent tragedy, in which he showed what cruel massacres were perpetrated while the rulers of Christendom refused to help Christian patriots against the Turks. Byron is called the poet of revolution; but Shelley was the poet of liberty. One was like a painter who captivated the multitude, sometimes by his brilliancy of colour, sometimes by his tragic pathos, and sometimes by his amorous warmth. The other was like a sculptor who left a few statues and tablets, fanciful in design and majestic in execution, for the delight of connoisseurs. Fortunately the marble is likely to outlast the canvas. III. These poets and philanthropists helped the people of England contrast the wrongs they were suffering with the rights they ought to have. That love of liberty which drove out the Stuarts revived, as despotism was seen to increase pauperism and excite more crime than it suppressed. The conflict between republicanism and monarchy in Europe had changed to one between despotism and constitutionalism; and peace made England free to resume the advanced position she had held in the eighteenth century. The declaration of President Monroe, in December, 1823, that the United States would not permit the South American republics to be overthrown by any despot in Europe, gained much authority from the concurrence of the British Ministry; and the latter was induced by Canning to form that alliance with France and Russia which gave independence to Greece.