torch; and after all, every young couple start with some such high-flown notions in their heads; but I must have some guarantee that your wife and children are not left as burdens upon the parish, when you begin to feel the pinch of real life, and the glamour of your imagination fades from your 'divine mistress.' Marriage was not ordained to be the paradise of ideal love, but for the sober discipline of the affections of men and women, and above all for the production and rearing up of good citizens of the commonwealth. To judge by your own writings, Mr. Shelley, you seem to have been running after a will-o'-the-wisp all your life in this ideal love. And if _you_ did not catch it, is it likely that Tom, Dick, and Harry will? In any case the pursuit of it seems just as likely to make inconstant lovers as that sensuality you affect to look down upon. You always had the word 'for ever' on your tongue; but how long did your for evers last? No, no, my dear sir, the good of society demands fidelity to incurred responsibilities, and we find by practical experience that both men and women, but especially men, are inclined to shirk the responsibilities which indulgence of the sexual passion brings in its train. Hence the marriage contract. It does not concern itself primarily with either love or lovers, but it helps to keep husbands and wives together, and women and children maintained decently without coming upon the rates. And, mind you, it does not by any means leave love out in the cold. It may not rise to your transcendental ecstasy; but it is love all the same, good honest domestic affection, when your young couples get well broken to harness. Did you not say yourself that one might as well go to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton as to you for anything human? Well, give me the wholesome leg of mutton--none of your gin for me. Egad, sir, when I see some honest couple going to church of a Sunday morning, with half-a-dozen pretty children about them, I call that a poem--ay, and a better poem, Mr. Shelley, than all the fantastic Epipsychidions you ever put upon paper. Hang it all, sir, let a man make love to his own wife, and stick to her when he has got her. I'm a plain man, sir, but I hope a moral man, and them's my sentiments." To all which, let Shelley reply as best he may. The fact is that he has given no satisfactory reply, simply because it was only just before his death that he realised the complexity of the problem of life. He did, however, see clearly that the bringing of men and women into more complete harmony, by raising the ideal of love, was the most important step towards that renewal of the world, that living of the most perfect life attainable by man, for which he sighed and after which he strove; and he saw clearly that our solution of the marriage problem was imperfect, not merely in practice, but to some extent in theory. As regards the subjection of women, he seems to have considered this wholly an artificial product of religious