It is true that he shared the fate of nearly all the great poets contemporary with him, in being unappreciated. Like them, he suffered from critics who were for ever shearing the wild tresses of poetry between rusty rules, who could never see a literary bough project beyond the trim level of its day but they must lop it with a crooked criticism, who kept indomitably planting in the defile of fame the "established canons" that had been spiked by poet after poet. But we decline to believe that a singer of Shelley's calibre could be seriously grieved by want of vogue. Not that we suppose him to have found consolation in that senseless superstition, "the applause of posterity." Posterity! posterity which goes to Rome, weeps large-sized tears, carves beautiful inscriptions over the tomb of Keats; and the worm must wriggle her curtsey to it all, since the dead boy, wherever he be, has quite other gear to tend. Never a bone less dry for all the tears! A poet must to some extent be a chameleon and feed on air. But it need not be the musty breath of the multitude. He can find his needful support in the judgement of those whose judgement he knows valuable, and such support Shelley had: La gloire Ne compte pas toujours les voix; Elle les pese quelquefois. Yet if this might be needful to him as support, neither this, nor the applause of the present, nor the applause of posterity, could have been needful to him as motive: the one all-sufficing motive for a great poet's singing is that expressed by Keats: I was taught in Paradise To ease my breast of melodies. Precisely so. The overcharged breast can find no ease but in suckling the baby-song. No enmity of outward circumstances, therefore, but his own nature, was responsible for Shelley's doom.