e has forged to confine
its energies.... Anti-matrimonialism is as necessarily connected with
scepticism as if religion and marriage began their course together,'
for both are the fruit of odious superstition. He was endeavouring to
persuade Harriet Westbrook to join him in testifying by example
against the obsolete and ignoble ceremony of the marriage service,
which he held to be a degradation that no one could ask 'an amiable
and beloved female' to undergo. In Shelley's case, as in Byron's, the
letters are of inestimable biographical value as witnesses to
character, as reflecting the vicissitudes of a life which was to the
writer more like the 'fierce vexation of a dream' than a well-spent
leisurely existence, and as the sincere unstudied expression of his
emotions. For all these reasons they are essential to a right
appreciation of his magnificent poetry.

William Godwin, pedantic, self-conceited, and impecunious, has come
down to us as a kind of central figure in a literary group which
included such men as Coleridge, Shelley, and Lamb, of whom the
somewhat formal English world at the beginning of this century was not
worthy. By reason of this position, and because Shelley married his
daughter, he became the cause and subject of excellent letter-writing,
though his own correspondence is heavy with philosophic platitudes. It
is of the class which, as we have said, is akin to essays; he
discourses at large upon first principles in religion and politics;
and out of his frigid philosophy came some of Shelley's most ardent
paradoxes. But some of the most amusing letters in the English
language were addressed to him. It was after a supper at Godwin's that
Coleridge wrote remorsefully acknowledging 'a certain tipsiness'--not
that he felt any 'unpleasant titubancy'--whereby he had been seduced
into defending a momentary idea as if it had been an old and firmly
established principle; which (we may add) has been the way of other
talkers since Coleridge. No one, he goes on to say, could have a
greater horror than himself of the principles he thus accidentally
propounded, or a deeper conviction of their irrationality; 'but the
whole thinking of my life will not bear me up against the crowd and
press of my mind, when it is elevated beyond its natural pitch.' The
effect of punch, after wine, was to make a philosopher argue hotly
against his profoundest beliefs; yet it is to Godwin's supper that we
owe this diverting palinodia. An