ects permanent, it must proceed to
regiment the converts in organised associations, which speedily develop
all the evils that have ruined the despotism it set out to overthrow.

The interest of this revolutionary epic lies largely in the marriage of
Godwin's ideas with Mary Wollstonecraft's, which in the second
generation bears its full imaginative fruit. The most eloquent verses
are those which describe Cythna's leadership of the women in the
national revolt, and enforce the theme "Can man be free, if woman be a
slave?" Not less characteristic is the Godwinian abhorrence of violence,
and the Godwinian trust in the magic of courageous passivity. Laon finds
the revolutionary hosts about to slaughter their vanquished oppressors,
and persuades them to mercy and fraternity with the appeal.

O wherefore should ill ever flow from ill
And pain still keener pain for ever breed.

He pardons and spares the tyrant himself; and Cythna shames the slaves
who are sent to bind her, until they weep in a sudden perception of the
beauty of virtue and courage. When the reaction breaks at length upon
the victorious liberators, they stand passive to be hewn down, as
Shelley, in the _Masque of Anarchy_, written after Peterloo, advised
the English reformers to do.

With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay,
Till their rage has died away.

Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.

The simple stanzas might have been written by Blake. There is something
in the primitive Christianity of this aggressive Atheist which breathes
the childlike innocence of the Kingdom of Heaven. Shelley dreamed of "a
nation made free by love." With a strange mystical insight, he stepped
beyond the range of the Godwinian ethics, when he conceived of his
humane missionaries as victims who offer themselves a living sacrifice
for the redemption of mankind. Prometheus chained to his rock, because
he loved and defied, by some inscrutable magic of destiny, brings at
last by his calm endurance the consummation of the Golden Age. Laon
walks voluntarily on to the pile which the Spanish inquisitor had heaped
for him; and Cythna flings herself upon the flames in a last
affirmation of the power of self-sacrifice and the beauty of
comradeship.

Thrice Shelley essayed to paint the state of perfection whi