pression, or in such fancies as the _Witch of Atlas_, that Shelley can
escape from the obsession of _Political Justice_. The voice of Godwin
does not disturb us in _The Skylark_, and it is silenced by the violent
passions of _The Cenci_. But in all the more formal and graver
utterances of Shelley's genius, from _Queen Mab_ to _Hellas_, it
supplies the theme and Shelley writes the variations. _Queen Mab_,
indeed, is nothing but a fervent lad's attempt to state in verse the
burden of Godwin's prose. Some passages in it (notably the lines about
commerce) are a mere paraphrase or summary of pages from _The Enquirer_
or _Political Justice_. In the _Revolt of Islam_, and still more in
_Prometheus Unbound_, Shelley's imagination is becoming its own master.
The variations are more important, more subtle, more beautiful than the
theme; but still the theme is there, a precise and definite dogma for
fancy to embroider. It is only in _Hellas_ that Shelley's power of
narrative (in Hassan's story), his irrepressible lyrical gift, and his
passion which at length could speak in its own idiom, combine to make a
masterpiece which owes to Godwin only some general ideas. If the
transcript became less literal, it was not that the influence had waned.
It was rather that Shelley was gaining the full mastery of his own
native powers of expression. In these poems he assumes or preaches all
Godwin's characteristic doctrines, perfectibility, non-resistance,
anarchism, communism, the power of reason and the superiority of
persuasion over force, universal benevolence, and the ascription of
moral evil to the desolating influence of "positive institution."

The general agreement is so obvious that one need hardly illustrate it.
What is more curious is the habit which Shelley acquired of reproducing
even the minor opinions or illustrations which had struck him in his
continual reading of Godwin. When Mammon advises Swellfoot the Tyrant to
refresh himself with

A simple kickshaw by your Persian cook
Such as is served at the Great King's second table.
The price and pains which its ingredients cost
Might have maintained some dozen families
A winter or two--not more.

he is simply making an ironical paraphrase from Godwin. The fine scene
in Canto XI. of the _Revolt of Islam_, in which Laon, confronting the
tyrant on his throne, quells by a look and a word a henchman who was
about to stab him, is a too brief rendering of Godwin's reflections o