n an intelligent people drove out a brood of vampires,
who had drained the blood of France too long, to be replaced by
atrocious demagogues, hateful priest-ridden Bourbons and a Napoleon
Bonaparte, the wholesale Jaffa poisoner, on whose death Shelley wrote
lines pregnant with republican feelings:

"I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan
To think that a most ambitious slave,
Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne
Where it had stood even now; thou didst prefer
A frail and bloody pomp, which time has swept
In fragments towards oblivion. Massacre,
For this I pray'd would on thy sleep have crept,
Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear and Lust,
And stifled thee, their minister. I know
Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,
That virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than force or fraud; old custom, legal crime,
And bloody Faith, the foulest birth of time."

With full knowledge of all this, he hopefully looked with loving eyes
toward this side of the Atlantic, to your magnificent constitution and
model Republic, built on the consolidated masonic bases of Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity, as did also the mass of my compatriots, who,
suffering under a more intolerant despotism, and unable to help
themselves, had no hand or voice in the attempted tyranny, from which
your forefathers properly rebelled one hundred years ago.

In "Hellas" we find Shelley advocating the cause of Greece, and it is
believed, that that poem assisted his friend Byron in the
determination to wield his sword in the cause of Grecian Liberty. "The
Revolt of Islam," his most mystical work, next to his early effort,
"St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian," is full of the most majestic and
sympathetic thoughts, and underlying its weirdness we have all those
elements "which essentially compose a poem in the cause of a liberal
and comprehensive morality, and with the view of kindling in the bosom
of his readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty
and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither
violence, nor misrepresentation, nor prejudice, nor the continual
presence and pressure of evil, can ever totally extinguish among
mankind."

Can we wonder that Shelley could be else than Republican when he
regarded what Thackeray afterward summed up with biting irony, the
record of the reigning house of Great Britain, the mad