And, so everywhere the moral element--the sense for Conduct--mingles itself with his literary judgment. But it was in his attack on Shelley, written within four months of his own death, that he most vigorously displayed his detestation of moral shortcomings, and his sense of their poisonous effect on the performances of genius. "In this article on Shelley," he wrote, "I have spoken of his life, not his poetry. Professor Dowden was too much for my patience."[33] It can hardly be questioned that the publication of that biography did a signal disservice to the memory of the poet whom Professor Dowden idolized. The lack of taste, judgment, and humour which pervades the book, and its complete, though of course unintended, condonation of heinous evil, deserved a severe castigation, and Arnold bestowed it with a vigour and a thoroughness which show how deeply his moral sense had been shocked. "What a set! what a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of 'the occurrences of Shelley's private life.' ... Godwin's house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and holding the hat, and the green-spectacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg the faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this precious world!" Fresh from pursuing, step by step, Professor Dowden's grim narrative of seduction and suicide, with its ludicrous testimony to Shelley's "conscientiousness," Arnold says, with honest indignation, "After reading his book, one feels sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relations.... I conclude that an entirely human inflammability, joined to an inhuman want of humour and a super-human power of self-deception, are the causes which chiefly explain Shelley's abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and then his behaviour to her and defence of himself afterwards." In spite of all this abomination, which he so clearly saw and so strongly reprehended, he still stands firm in his admiration of the "ideal Shelley," "the delightful Shelley," "the friend of the unfriended poor," the radiant and many-coloured poet, with his mastery of the medium of sounds, and the "natural magic in his rhythm." But then he adds this salutary caution: "Let no one suppose that a want of humour and a self-delusion such as Shelley's have no effect upon a man's poetry. The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either." In poetry, as in life, he is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel."