"

To these superstitious and ambitious pretensions he traced the
corruption which disorganized society, leading it down even to the
very worst immoralities.

"All things are sold: the very light of heaven
Is venal....
Those duties which heart of human love
Should urge him to perform instinctively
Are bought and sold as in a public mart.

* * * * *

Even love is sold; the solace of all woe
Is turned to deadliest agony, old age
Shivers in selfish beauty's loathing arms,
And youth's corrupted impulses prepare
A life of horror from the blighting bane
Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs
From unenjoying sensualism has filled
All human life with hydra-headed woes."

"Shelley," says Mary, in her note on the poem, "was eighteen when he
wrote 'Queen Mab.' He never published it. When it was written, he
had come to the decision that he was too young to be a judge of
controversies." The wife-editor refers to a series of
articles published in the "New Monthly Magazine" for 1832 by a
fellow-collegian, a warm friend of Shelley's, touching upon his
school-life, and describing the state of his mind at college. The
worst of all these biographical sketches of remarkable men is, that
delicacy, discretion, or some other euphemistically named form of
hesitancy, induces writers to suppress the incidents which supply the
very angles of the form they want to delineate; and it is especially
so in Shelley's case. I am sure, that, if Mary, or my father, or any
of those with whom Shelley conversed most thoroughly, had related some
of the more extravagant incidents of his early life exactly as they
occurred, we should better understand the tenor of his thought,--and
we should also have the most valuable complement to that part of
his intellectual progress which stands in contrast with the earlier
portion. Now, as I have said, at school Shelley was a more practical
and impracticable mutineer than his friends have generally allowed.
They have been anxious to soften his "faults"; and the consequence
is, that we miss the force of the boy's logic and the vigor of his
Catonian experiments.

Again, accident has made me aware of facts which give me to
understand, that, in passing through the usual curriculum of a college
life in all its paths, Shelley did not go scathless,--but that, in
the tampering with venal pleasures, his health was seriously, and not
transiently, injure