In acting thus to young girls, without the sanction or knowledge of their natural guardians, the apt pupil of the hard-swearing Windsor doctor is declared by the most fervid of his admirers to have been justified, because he was a sincere and earnest teacher of what he believed to be the truth, an enthusiastic assailant of error, and a fervid enemy of intolerance. Though his action was often strangely wanting in candour and openness, was sometimes odiously secretive and treacherous towards the parents of the young girls with whose faith he tampered, the sincerity of his religious sentiments and utterances is open to no suspicion. It is unquestionable that he believed what he tried to make others believe,--that he was wholly convinced and absolutely certain of the falseness of the opinions which he entreated other people to repudiate as false. It cannot be doubted he was an enthusiastic assailant of what he thought to be error, and the majority of his acquaintance thought to be the reverse of error. In one sense, he was no doubt a disinterested assailant of what he thought to be error. But how about his tolerance? his hatred of intolerance? For the moment we are not thinking of the Italian Shelley, who, after warring wildly with all who differed from him in opinion, desisted in some degree from the bootless strife,--on discovering that what was truth to him might be error to higher intelligence, that the people from whom he differed in opinion had the same right to their manifestly erroneous opinions as he had to his possibly erroneous views; that human creatures could not be forced out of their errors by passionate speech; that disputants fighting with subtle arguments and hot words might be as essentially intolerant as disputants fighting with instruments of torture and blazing faggots. To say that the Shelley, who, after surviving the phrensies of his earlier manhood, wrote the _Essay on Christianity_, was devoid of tolerance would be unjust. But how about the Shelley who wrote _Laon and Cythna_, who raved against religion in _Queen Mab_, and was moved by hatred of error to teach Harriett Westbrook (ætat. 16), Harriett Grove (ætat. 17), his sister Elizabeth (ætat. 16), Felicia Browne (ætat. 16), that Christianity was made up of monstrous fables and delusions; that the Christian religion was accountable for the worst evils of human society; that the sentiment of the Christian faith was pernicious and execrable. Was this enemy of intolerance chiefly remarkable for tolerance? Whilst railing at the world's want of tolerance, Shelley was himself a caricature of intolerance.