ly as other men
feel their way by touch. This ardent, sensitive, emotional nature, with
all its gift of lyrical speech and passionate feeling, was in fact the
ideal man of the Godwinian conception, who lives by reason and obeys
principles. Three men in modern times have achieved a certain fame by
their rigid obedience to "rational" conceptions of conduct--Thomas Day,
who wrote _Sandford and Merton_, Bentham, and Herbert Spencer. But the
erratic, fanciful Shelley was as much the enthusiastic slave of reason,
as any of these three; and he seemed erratic only because to be
perfectly rational is in this world the wildest form of eccentricity. He
came upon _Political Justice_ while he was still a school-boy at Eton;
and his diaries show that there hardly passed a year of his life in
which he omitted to re-read it. Its phraseology colours his prose; his
mind was built upon it, as Milton's was upon the Bible. We hardly
require his own confession to assure us of the debt. "The name of
Godwin," he wrote in 1812, "has been used to excite in me feelings of
reverence and admiration. I have been accustomed to consider him a
luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him. From the
earliest period of my knowledge of his principles, I have ardently
desired to share on the footing of intimacy that intellect which I have
delighted to contemplate in its emanations. Considering then, these
feelings, you will not be surprised at the inconceivable emotions with
which I learnt your existence and your dwelling. I had enrolled your
name in the list of the honourable dead. I had felt regret that the
glory of your being had passed from this earth of ours. It is not so.
You still live, and I firmly believe are still planning the welfare of
human kind."

The enthusiastic youth was to learn that his master's preoccupation was
with concerns more sordid and more pressing than the welfare of human
kind; but if close personal intercourse brought some disillusionment
regarding Godwin's private character, it only deepened his intellectual
influence, and confirmed Shelley's lifelong adhesion to his system. No
contemporary thinker ever contested Godwin's empire over Shelley's
mind; and if in later years Plato claimed an ever-growing share in his
thoughts, we must remember that in several of his fundamental tenets
Godwin was a Platonist without knowing it. It is only in his purely
personal utterances, in the lyrics which rendered a mood or an
im