s us that he
was "well worth hearing," even amid the brilliance of Lamb, Hunt, and
Hazlitt, and could display "a grim jocularity of sarcasm."

One of these relationships has become historical, and has coloured the
whole modern judgment of Godwin. It would be no exaggeration to say that
Godwin formed Shelley's mind, and that _Prometheus Unbound_ and _Hellas_
were the greatest of Godwin's works. That debt is too often forgotten,
while literary gossip loves to remind us that it was repaid in cheques
and _post-obits_. The intellectual relationship will be discussed in a
later chapter; the bare facts of the personal connection must be told
here. _Political Justice_ took Shelley's mind captive while he was still
at Eton, much as it had obsessed Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. The
influence with him was permanent; and _Queen Mab_ is nothing but Godwin
in verse, with prose notes which quote or summarise him. A
correspondence began in 1811, and the pupil met the master late in 1812,
and again in 1813. They talked as usual of virtue and human
perfectibility; and as the intimacy grew, Shelley, whose chief
employment at this time was to discover and relieve genius in distress,
began to place his present resources and future prospects at Godwin's
disposal. It was not an unnatural relationship to arise between a
grateful disciple, heir to a great fortune, and a philosopher, aged,
neglected, and sinking under the burden of debt.

Shelley's romantic runaway match with Harriet Westbrook had meanwhile
entered on the period of misery and disillusion. She had lost her early
love of books and ideas, had taken to hats and ostentation, and had
become so harsh to him that he welcomed absence. It is certain that he
believed her to be also in the vulgar sense of the word unfaithful. At
this crisis, when the separation seemed already morally complete, he met
Mary Godwin, who had been absent from home during most of his earlier
visits. She was a young girl of seventeen, eager for knowledge and
experience, and as her father described her, "singularly bold, somewhat
imperious and active of mind," and "very pretty." They rapidly fell in
love. Godwin's conduct was all that the most conventional morality could
have required of him. His theoretical views of marriage were still
unorthodox; he held at least that "the institution might with advantage
admit of certain modifications." But nine years before in the preface to
_Fleetwood_ he had protested