e the other poets of the Romantic Movement Shelley expended his
emotion on three main objects--politics, nature, and love. In each of
these subjects he struck a note peculiar to himself, but his singularity
is perhaps greatest in the sphere of politics. It may be summed up in
the observation that no English imaginative writer of the first rank
has been equally inspired by those doctrines that helped to produce
the French Revolution. That all men are born free and equal; that by
a contract entered into in primitive times they surrendered as much of
their rights as was necessary to the well-being of the community, that
despotic governments and established religions, being violations of the
original contract, are encroachments on those rights and the causes
of all evil; that inequalities of rank and power can be abolished by
reasoning, and that then, since men are naturally good, the golden
age will return--these are positions which the English mind, with
its dislike of the 'a priori', will not readily accept. The English
Utilitarians, who exerted a great influence on the course of affairs,
and the classical school of economists that derived from them, did
indeed hold that men were naturally good, in a sense. Their theory was
that, if people were left to themselves, and if the restraints imposed
by authority on thought and commerce were removed, the operation of
ordinary human motives would produce the most beneficent results. But
their theory was quite empirical; worked out in various ways by Adam
Smith, Bentham, and Mill, it admirably suited the native independence of
the English character, and was justified by the fact that, at the end of
the eighteenth century, governments were so bad that an immense increase
of wealth, intelligence, and happiness was bound to come merely from
making a clean sweep of obsolete institutions. Shelley's Radicalism
was not of this drab hue. He was incapable of soberly studying the
connections between causes and effects an incapacity which comes out
in the distaste he felt for history--and his conception of the ideal
at which the reformer should aim was vague and fantastic. In both
these respects his shortcomings were due to ignorance of human nature
proceeding from ignorance of himself.

And first as to the nature of his ideals. While all good men must
sympathise with the sincerity of his passion to remould this sorry
scheme of things "nearer to the heart's desire," few will find the
model,