We may, at all events, while a grateful England is cherishing Shelley's memory, and congratulating herself on his majestic legacy of song to her, reflect almost with amusement on the very different attitude of public opinion seventy and even fifty years ago. That he should have been pursued by calumny and prejudice through his brief, misrepresented life, and even beyond the tomb, can surprise no thinking spirit. It was not the poet who was attacked; it was the revolutionist, the enemy of kings and priests, the extravagant and paradoxical humanitarian. It is not needful, in order to defend Shelley's genius aright, to inveigh against those who, taught in the prim school of eighteenth-century poetics, and repelled by political and social peculiarities which they but dimly understood, poured out their reprobation of his verses. Even his reviewers, perhaps, were not all of them "beaten hounds" and "carrion kites"; some, perhaps, were very respectable and rather narrow-minded English gentlemen, devoted to the poetry of Shenstone. The newer a thing is, in the true sense, the slower people are to accept it, and the abuse of the _Quarterly Review_, rightly taken, was but a token of Shelley's opulent originality. To this unintelligent aversion there succeeded in the course of years an equally blind, although more amiable, admiration. Among a certain class of minds the reaction set in with absolute violence, and once more the centre of attention was not the poet and his poetry, but the faddist and his fads. Shelley was idealised, etherealised, and canonised. Expressions were used about his conduct and his opinions which would have been extravagant if employed to describe those of a virgin-martyr or of the founder of a religion. Vegetarians clustered around the eater of buns and raisins, revolutionists around the enemy of kings, social anarchists around the husband of Godwin's daughter. Worse than all, those to whom the restraints of religion were hateful, marshalled themselves under the banner of the youth who had rashly styled himself an atheist, forgetful of the fact that all his best writings attest that, whatever name he might give himself, he, more than any other poet of the age, saw God in everything. This also was a phase, and passed away. The career of Shelley is no longer a battlefield for fanatics of one sort or the other; if they still skirmish a little in its obscurer corners, the main tract of it is not darkened with the smoke from their artillery. It lies, a fair open country of pure poetry, a province which comes as near to being fairyland as any that literature provides for us.