“I address myself not to the young enthusiast only, to the ardent devotee of truth and virtue--the pure and passionate moralist, yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. He will embrace a pure system from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit. Unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct. It will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind that beings, capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies, should take delight in the deathpangs and last convulsions of dying animals. “The elderly man, whose youth has been poisoned by intemperance, or who has lived with apparent moderation, and is afflicted with a variety of painful maladies, would find his account in a beneficial change, produced without the risk of poisonous medicines. The mother, to whom the perpetual restlessness of disease, and unaccountable deaths incident to her children, are the causes of incurable unhappiness, would, on this diet, experience the satisfaction of beholding their perpetual health and natural playfulness.[239] The most valuable lives are daily destroyed by diseases that it is dangerous to palliate, and impossible to cure, by medicine. How much longer will man continue to pimp for the gluttony of Death--his most insidious, implacable, and eternal foe?” Some time after the melancholy death of his first wife, Shelley married Mary Wolstoncroft, the daughter of William Godwin, author of _Political Justice_--perhaps the most revolutionary of all pleas for a change in the constitution of society that has ever proceeded from a prosaic tradesman, such as, in the ordinary intercourse of life and interchange of ideas, his biography and correspondence (lately published) prove him to have been. Her mother was the celebrated and earliest advocate of the rights of women. Previously, the lovers had travelled through France and part of Germany, and an account of their six weeks’ tour was afterwards printed by Mrs. Shelley.