(13) In obedience to sincere and vehement passion for a woman, whether she were maid or wife, every man was by the Shelleyan doctrine at liberty to solicit her for corresponding affection, and to his utmost, in all truthful ways, to render himself no less loveable in her eyes than she seemed loveable to him. Whilst thinking that in the majority of cases such a passion would prove of considerable duration, he saw also that in a minority of cases it would speedily wane and perish, either through the discovery of previously existing, though unobserved, defects in its object, or through the mental, moral, or physical deterioration of the idolized person, or through the attachment’s extinction by a more powerful passion for a more perfect and loveable being. On the occurrence of any such contingency, Shelley was of opinion that, on seeing it would be more conducive to _his own_ enjoyment of life to withdraw from a no longer congenial mate, a man should act promptly in doing so, and not be restrained from pursuing his own happiness by any pitiful notion that honour and morality required him to remain in discontent, out of regard to the feelings and interests of his conjugal partner. ‘Constancy,’ in his opinion, ‘had nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it conferred’ on the persisting person. In ridiculing George the Third’s ‘household virtue, most uncommon, Of constancy to a bad, ugly woman,’ Byron placed conjugal constancy amongst the domestic virtues. Shelley took another view of the quality, which, appearing to him (at its best) as nothing better than a particular kind of selfish prudence, ‘partook of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endured tamely moral defects of magnitude in the objects of its indiscreet choice.’ (14) It must be remembered that Shelley did not propound these views as mere theories for discussion amongst philosophers, without any serious desire that they should become rules of personal conduct under existing social circumstances, but as principles of social science and morals, on which men would do well to act. Unlike William Godwin, who backed out of his own more fantastic theories as soon as the accidents of life afforded him a good opportunity for putting them in practice, Shelley was ‘thorough’ at this period of his life, and ready at any moment to do any wild thing which, with boyish impetuosity and self-sufficiency, he had talked himself into thinking a thing that ought to be done. Holding these views in the spring of 1813, he acted upon them in the summer of 1814.