rst Gentleman in Europe;" and in the following
lines, which I have taken from this poem, I have chosen two extracts,
descriptive of the origin of political despotism, and the reason of
its continuance:

"Whence, thinkest thou, kings and parasites arose?
Whence that unnatural line of drones, who heap
Toil and unvanquishable penury
On those who build their palaces, and bring
Their daily bread? From vice, black, loathsome vice,
From rapine, madness, treachery and wrong;
From all that genders misery, and makes
Of earth this thorny wilderness; from lust,
Revenge and murder."

* * * * *

"Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
The subject, not the citizen; for kings
And subjects, mutual foes, forever play
A losing game into each other's hands,
Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man
Of virtuous soul commands not nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton."

Shelley believed in reformation, not revolution; and in the "Revolt of
Islam" and his Irish pamphlets, we find him advocating a bloodless
revolution, except where force was used, and then force for force, if
compromise were hopeless. His idea was ever the foundation of
political systems founded on that of this country, or on the ancient
Greek Republic. He says:

"The study of modern history is the study of kings,
financiers, statesmen, and priests. The history of ancient
Greece is the study of legislators, philosophers, and poets;
it is the history of men compared with the history of
titles. What the Greeks were was a reality, not a promise.
And what we are and hope to be is derived, as it were, from
the influence of these glorious generations."

Hoping almost against hope for the regeneration of his country, he
submitted to the people of England a proposal for putting to the vote
the great reform question, which was filling the public mind; but he
was conscious that in the then unprepared state of public knowledge
and feeling, universal suffrage was fraught with peril, and remarks
that although

"A pure republic may be shown, by inferences the most
obvious and irresistible, to be that system of social order
the fittest to produce the happ