in the distaste he felt for history--and his conception of the ideal at which the reformer should aim was vague and fantastic. In both these respects his shortcomings were due to ignorance of human nature proceeding from ignorance of himself. And first as to the nature of his ideals. While all good men must sympathise with the sincerity of his passion to remould this sorry scheme of things "nearer to the heart's desire," few will find the model, as it appears in his poems, very exhilarating. It is chiefly expressed in negatives: there will be no priests, no kings, no marriage, no war, no cruelty--man will be "tribeless and nationless." Though the earth will teem with plenty beyond our wildest imagination, the general effect is insipid; or, if there are colours in the scene, they are hectic, unnatural colours. His couples of lovers, isolated in bowers of bliss, reading Plato and eating vegetables, are poor substitutes for the rich variety of human emotions which the real world, with all its admixture of evil, actually admits. Hence Shelley's tone irritates when he shrilly summons us to adore his New Jerusalem. Reflecting on the narrowness of his ideals we are apt to see him as an ignorant and fanatical sectary, and to detect an unpleasant flavour in his verse. And we perceive that, as with all honest fanatics, his narrowness comes from ignorance of himself. The story of Mrs. Southey's buns is typical. When he visited Southey there were hot buttered buns for tea, and he so much offended Mrs. Southey by calling them coarse, disgusting food that she determined to make him try them. He ate first one, then another, and ended by clearing off two plates of the unclean thing. Actively conscious of nothing in himself but aspirations towards perfection, he never saw that, like everyone else, he was a cockpit of ordinary conflicting instincts; or, if this tumult of lower movements did emerge into consciousness, he would judge it to be wholly evil, since it had no connection, except as a hindrance, with his activities as a reformer. Similarly the world at large, full as it was of nightmare oppressions of wrong, fell for him into two sharply opposed spheres of light and darkness on one side the radiant armies of right, on the other the perverse opposition of devils.