(12) It is obvious that the Free Love, which Shelley recommended as a wholesome substitute for antiquated wedlock, would permit the ordinary seducer to pursue his favourite diversion with absolute impunity; and that Shelley, with all his avowed abhorrence of seducers, would at least have regarded leniently several practices, that in the opinion of most men amount to seduction. In ordinary parlance, the man who takes a hitherto virtuous girl under his protection, and uses her as his mistress, is termed her seducer, and the proceeding by which the girl is brought to so discreditable a position is called her seduction. For instance, though he would have indignantly denied the charge, Byron’s intercourse with Claire would by most persons be regarded as a sufficient reason for holding him guilty of an offence of which even libertines do not like to be thought capable. Shelley certainly cannot have used the word in this sense when he wrote to the Chevalier de Lawrence that seduction was ‘an enormous and desolating crime, of which he should shudder to be accused;’ for after showing positive sympathy with Byron’s tenderness for Claire in the earlier stages of the fleeting passion, he exerted himself to bring about a renewal of their association, just as though he were a brother set on arranging some discord between his sister and her husband. It is not easy to see in what sense he used the word when he wrote to the Chevalier that ‘seduction ... could have no meaning in a rational state of society.’ Questioned on the point, he would probably have said that to pursue a woman for purely sensual ends, with false assurances of sentimental preference and affectionate devotion, was ‘the enormous and desolating crime.’