“Brimming over with love for men, he was deficient in sympathy with the conditions under which they actually think and feel. Could he but dethrone the anarch, Custom, the ‘Millennium,’ he argued, would immediately arrive; nor did he stop to think how different was the fibre of his own soul from that of the unnumbered multitudes around him. In his adoration of what he recognised as _living_, he retained no reverence for the ossified experience of past ages.... For he had a vital faith, and this faith made the ideals he conceived seem possible--faith in the duty and desirability of overthrowing idols; faith in the gospel of liberty, fraternity, equality; faith in the divine beauty of Nature; faith in the perfectibility of man; faith in the omnipresent soul, whereof our souls are atoms; faith in love, as the ruling and co-ordinating substance of morality. The man who lived by this faith was in no vulgar sense of the word ‘atheist.’ When he proclaimed himself to be one he pronounced his hatred of a gloomy religion which had been the instrument of kings and priests for the enslavement of their fellow beings. As he told his friend Trelawney, he used the word _Atheism_ ‘to express his abhorrence of superstition: he took it up, as a knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance of injustice.’”[234] So thorough was his contempt for mere received and routine thought, that even Aristotle, the great idol of the mediæval schoolmen, and still an object of extraordinary veneration in the elder University, became for him a kind of synonym for despotic authority-- “Tomes Of reasoned Wrong glozed on by Ignorance”-- and was, accordingly, treated with undue neglect. As for politics, as represented in the parliament and public Press of his day, he was indignantly impatient of the too usual trifling and unreality of public life. He seldom read the newspapers; nor could he ever bring himself to mix with the “rabble of the House.” Thus, forced into antipathy to the ordinary and orthodox business of life around him, the poet withdrew himself more and more from it into his own thoughts, and hopes, and aspirations, which he communicated to his familiar friends. Some of those, however, into whose society he chanced to be thrown, were not of a sort of mind most congenial to his own. Yet they all bear witness to his surpassing moral no less than mental, constitution. “In no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley,” says one of his most intimate acquaintances; “in no being was the perception of right and wrong more acute.”