This poet of the future was scorned in his lifetime, as no other great Englishman in history. He was the byword of the literary wits of London; “Prometheus Unbound,” they said, an excellent name: who would bind it? By Sir Walter Scott and his ruffians of the Tory “Review,” Shelley’s name could not be spoken without crossing yourself. The poet Moore cried out in horror--Tommy, little snob of the drawing-rooms, who “dearly loved a lord.” And Wordsworth, ignorant and bigoted, living among his peasants, reading nothing; and Southey, turncoat and prig. Even Byron made no fight for Shelley’s fame; while Byron’s friends, the fashionable idlers of the Continent, rebuked him for keeping such disreputable company. Even two generations later the evil spell was not broken. Matthew Arnold, standard English critic, read about Shelley’s friends, and lifted his scholarly hands and cried: “What a set!” It did not occur to the critic to ask what other kind of set Shelley might have had. What people had he to choose among? Arnold had not tried being a radical, so as to see what queer people swarm about you--especially when you are known to have an income of four thousand pounds a year, and to give away nearly all of it! A poet who believes everything good about his fellows, and who lives in dreams of exalted nobleness, is the last person in the world to discover the faults of those who gather about him. And after he has made the discovery, he remains a dreamer; instead of casting them off, in the fashion of the good, respectable world, he clings to them, trying to help them, often in spite of themselves. Shelley believed in “free love,” and tried out his theories; and that horrified Matthew Arnold, who said after reading the record, “One feels sickened forever of the subject of irregular relationships.” Quite so; I also have seen people try out this theory, and have felt sickened. But consider the question, in which way will the race more quickly acquire knowledge as to the rights and wrongs of sex--if men say honestly what they believe, and tell frankly what they do, or if they preach one code and practice another, and hide their sins in a dark corner? Shelley followed the former course; he was young, and knew no older person who understood him and could give him wise advice. He believed that if your heart was full of generosity and kindness and unselfishness and a burning sense of justice, you could trust your desires, even those of love. He tried it, and filled his life with pain and tragedy. And seventy or eighty years later comes an eminent and well-established critic, and in solemn tones protests that it is a crime against good taste to give us these facts! Let poets follow the plan of Wordsworth, who sowed his one wild oat in a foreign land, and put a heavy stone of silence over the crop, and became a Tory laureate and pillar of Churchianity!