What further evidence can readers of ordinary intelligence and temper require that, instead of being more outspoken and truth-loving than other people, the poet suffered from a deficiency of that repugnance to untruth which is the prime characteristic of English gentlemen; that he was capable of telling untruths, and did tell them, for small ends that would not draw Englishmen of average veracity a single hair's-breadth out of truth's clear and straight path? Of course the facts, which cannot fail to bring impartial readers to this painful conclusion, are regarded in another way, by those 'Shelleyan enthusiasts' who idolize the author of _Laon and Cythna_ as a being worthy of being likened to the Saviour of the World. The facts that to impartial minds are evidential of the poet's untruthfulness, the most extravagant of the Shelleyan zealots regard as so much evidence that their idol possessed an inordinately powerful imagination. What stronger evidence can there be of the overpowering vigour and sway of his fancy, than that so lofty and faultless a being could imagine himself capable of deceiving his publisher, of telling falsehoods to his father and mother, of educating his younger sister in untruth; and could, moreover, deliberately write himself down guilty of these flagrant offences, of which so faultless a being must have been innocent as the new-born babe? Scarcely less noteworthy than his avowal of the deceit he is practising on his father and mother, are the terms in which Shelley refers to the abrupt termination of his correspondence with Miss Harriett Grove, and declares his purpose of avenging himself on Intolerance for the annoyance that has come to him from the lady's disapproval of his religious scepticism.