Before his visit to Ireland, he had been engaged (as he tells his correspondent, William Godwin) in writing _An Inquiry into the Causes of the Failure of the French Revolution to Benefit Mankind_. We have to lament that this Essay seems never to have been completed, since it is hardly doubtful that it would have been of unusual interest. Such was the force and activity of Shelley’s intellect, as displayed in the regions of practical philosophy, at the age of twenty, and before he had given to the world his first productions in poetry. _Queen Mab_, written in part two years before, was finished and printed in 1813. Although it may have some of the defects of immaturity of genius, it has the charm of a genuine poetic inspiration. Intense hatred of selfish injustice and untruth in all their shapes, equally intense sympathy with all suffering, sublime faith in the ultimate triumph of Good, clothed in the language of entrancing eloquence and sublimity, are the characteristics of this unique poem. The author’s depreciation of his earliest poetic attempt in after years, in a letter addressed to the _Examiner_, only a month before his death, strikes us as scarcely sincere, and as having been a sort of necessary sacrifice on the altar of Expediency. In this exquisitely beautiful prophecy of a “Golden Age” to be, the fairy Queen Mab, the unembodied being who acts as his instructress and guide through the Universe, displays to his affrighted vision, in one vast panorama, the horrors of the Past and the Present. She afterwards, in a glorious apocalypse, relieves his despair by revealing to him the “new heavens and the new earth,” which eventually will displace the present evil constitution of things on our planet. On the redeemed and regenerated Globe:-- “Ambiguous Man! he that can know More misery, and can dream more joy than all: Whose keen sensations thrill within his heart, To mingle with a loftier instinct there, Lending their power to pleasure and to pain, Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each: Who stands amid the ever-varying world The burden or the glory of the Earth-- He chief perceives the change: his being notes The gradual renovation, and defines Each movement of its progress on his mind. * * * * *