ite in his view
of the destinies of mankind. Here he marched behind Godwin, and Godwin
hated vagueness. His intellect had assimilated all the steps in the
argument for perfectibility. It emerges in places in its most dogmatic
form. Institutions make us what we are, and to free us from their
shackles is to liberate virtue and unleash genius. He pauses midway in
the preface to _Prometheus_ to assure us that, if England were divided
into forty republics, each would produce philosophers and poets as great
and numerous as those of Athens. The road to perfection, however, is not
through revolution, but by the gradual extirpation of error. When he
writes in prose, he expresses himself with all the rather affected
intellectualism of the Godwinian psychology. "Revenge and retaliation,"
he remarks in the preface to _The Cenci_ "are pernicious _mistakes_."
But temperament counts for something even in a disciple so devout as
Shelley. He had an intellectual view of the world; but, when once the
rhythm of his musical verse had excited his mind to be itself, the force
and simplicity of his emotion transfuse and transform these
abstractions. Godwin's "universal benevolence" was with him an ardent
affectionate love for his kind. Godwin's cold precept that it was the
duty of an illuminated understanding to contribute towards the progress
of enquiry, by arguing about perfection and the powers of the mind in
select circles of friends who meet for debate, but never (virtue
forbids) for action, became for him a zealous missionary call.

One smiles, with his irreverent yet admiring biographers, at the early
escapades of the married boy--the visit to Dublin at the height of the
agitation for Catholic emancipation, the printing of his Address to the
Irish Nation, and his trick of scattering it by flinging copies from his
balcony at passers-by, his quaint attempts to persuade grave Catholic
noblemen that what they ought really to desire was a total and rapid
transformation of the whole fabric of society, his efforts to found an
association for the moral regeneration of mankind, and his elfish
amusement of launching the truth upon the waters in the form of
pamphlets sealed up in bottles. Shelley at this age perpetrated "rags"
upon the universe, much as commonplace youths make hay of their fellows'
rooms. It is amusing to read the solemn letters in which Godwin,
complacently accepting the post of mentor, tells Shelley that he is
much too young to