And the worst of it is that there are so many men, traitors to their sex, who are casting in their lot with women in this terrible Women's Rights movement--"unsexing themselves," too, no doubt--so that we shall all soon become either a-sexual or hermaphrodite beings! And here let us leave for a moment the more or less limited and prosaic Cythnas of the day, the terrible women who ride about upon Tartarian hobby-horses in novels and magazine articles, who spout on platforms and practise medicine and other dreadful trades--the scientific Mrs. Somervilles, and medical Mrs. Garrett Andersons, and pious Mrs. Josephine Butlers, and impious Mrs. Mona Cairds, and get back to Shelley himself, the poet of this shocking social aberration. Shelley, as Mr. Cordy Jeafferson has taken great pains to demonstrate, was an exceedingly immoral young man. He outraged the conventional morality of his day by his actions as well as in his writings in the most shameless manner; but this shamelessness was due to his intense conviction that he thus outraged _conventional_ in the interests of _ideal_ morality. His life and writings are so full of the paradoxical character which I have ascribed to the social agitation of the present day, and some of his utterances are so prophetic of it, that we may fairly regard him as its precursor. Shelley, as we know, started rather as an anarchist than as a mere reformer. His ideas were cataclysmal rather than evolutional. But he was an optimistic not a pessimistic anarchist, and he endeavoured to destroy in order to rebuild with all possible expedition. The kingdom of heaven was, for him, at the very doors, ready to take shape as soon as man willed it; and man _would_ will it as soon as the mind-forged fetters of his mind were loosed. Accordingly he endeavoured to loose them. He dethroned God that the Spirit of Nature might be enthroned; and then he proceeded to abolish marriage that free love might regenerate mankind. He believed in regeneration by incantation--a few words murmured in men's ears would make them as obedient to the ideas those sacred words represented as spirits to the spells of a magician. Abolish marriage (and what could be easier?), and love, being set free, prostitution would cease. We may pass by such puerilities of inexperienced idealism, to be found by the score in _Queen Mab_, and pass on to Shelley's more mature utterances, always remembering that he died, as the _Triumph of Life_ shows, in the very process of maturation. His whole history is that of an idealist, who first seeks his ideal in the actual, and not finding it endeavours to bring the actual into harmony with his ideal. His imagination hacks at the rude block of the world with the divine fury of a Pygmalion; thinking at first that he has but to remove the dull superfluous husks of custom to find the living idea in the centre; but gradually perceiving it was but created an inanimate image, which