Either by nature, or in reaction, he professed sympathy with the Augustan school of Queen Anne’s reign, and sided with Pope in the long quarrel as to whether Pope is a poet. Even the modern opponents of Byron must recognize in him qualities which won the admiration and affection of Scott and Shelley. In Shelley we had a true child of the revolution, the _Aufklarung_, and the later eighteenth century. His boyhood trifled with chemical science (probably not then popular with the human boy); his adolescence was given to converting school-girls into “dear little atheists.” His social ideas, like those of some advanced moderns, aimed at the absolute destruction of the family; and the moral of _Laon and Cythna_ went far behind the morals of the most backward savages, who make incest a capital offence. Shelley, a boy all his life, was more boyishly devoted to destruction than even the newest writers on the relations of the sexes. In “making all things new” both he and they are, in fact, relapsing on a condition of society which, if it ever existed, is so old that it may be called “pre-human,” and is contrary to nature, as far as we can study human nature in the least developed of tribes. His ideas conducted Shelley to the tragedy and farce of his career: his desertion of one young wife, followed by her suicide, and his marriage with another, in entire opposition to his own opinions. In literature he began at school with a devout following of Mrs. Radcliffe; while, in _Queen Mab_ and _Alastor_, vigorous but vague and misty _Childe Harold_, wandering in No Man’s Land, he first displayed his originality in poetical form. His personal character being noble and generous in the highest degree, his sympathy with the poor and the oppressed being a true passion, Shelley’s errors arose from the fixed idea that almost every human ordinance must, being old, be necessarily bad. He would recognize that there is, after all, something right in the sixth commandment, but did not draw the inference that a gleam of reason might also be found in most of the rest of the Decalogue. The state of society then, as always, provoked revolt, but the state of society was grievous, not because its moral laws were bad, but because its laws were not obeyed. Shelley had no turn for narrative, and, in such poems as _The Revolt of Islam_, it is the splendid meteoric genius, the unexcelled music that captivate. In lyrics he was probably the most original force since the Elizabethan age: his verse is a singing and soaring flame. In _Adonis_ his righteous indignation carries him forward like an angel with a sword of fire; and _The Witch of Atlas_ is a triumph in a new “fairy way of writing.” His is the Muse of clouds and stars, of sea and tempest, of all the aspects, and, in appearance, most capricious forces of the world, yet his is also the Muse of flowers and peaceful woods, of dejection and of delight. What the born rebel, Milton, might have