s he hung about the army
of revolt. Since then he has become a bit of a Philistine, though he
still affects a superior air, and retains a pretty way of turning a
sentence. The selection of such a man to pronounce the eulogy on Shelley
was in keeping with the whole proceedings at Horsham, where everybody
was lauding a "bogus Shelley," as Mr. Shaw remarked at the Hall of
Science celebration.

Mr. Gosse was good enough to tell the Horsham celebrants that "it
was not the poet who was attacked" in Shelley's case, but "the
revolutionist, the enemy of kings and priests, the extravagant
and paradoxical humanitarian." Mr. Gosse generously called this an
"intelligent aversion," and in another sense than his it undoubtedly was
so. The classes, interests, and abuses that were threatened by Shelley's
principles, acted with the intelligence of self-preservation. They gave
him an ill name and would gladly have hung him. Yes, it was, beyond all
doubt, an "intelligent aversion." Byron only dallied with the false and
foolish beliefs of his age, but Shelley meant mischief. This accounts
for the hatred shown towards him by orthodoxy and privilege.

Mr. Gosse himself appears to have an "intelligent aversion" to Shelley's
_principles_. He professes a great admiration for Shelley's _poetry_;
but he regards it as a sort of beautiful landscape, which has no other
purpose than gratifying the aesthetic taste of the spectator. For the
poet's _teaching_ he feels or affects a lofty contempt. Shelley the
singer was a marvel of delicacy and power; but Shelley the thinker was
at best a callow enthusiast. Had he lived as long as Mr. Gosse,
and moved in the same dignified society, he would have acquired an
"intelligent aversion" to the indiscretions of his youthful passion for
reforming the world; but fate decided otherwise, and he is unfortunate
enough to be the subject of Mr. Gosse's admonitions.

Shelley lived like a Spartan; a hunk of bread and a jug of water, dashed
perhaps with milk, served him as a dinner. His income was spent on the
poor, on struggling men of genius, and on necessitous friends. Now
as the world goes, this is simply asinine; and Mr. Gosse plays to the
Philistine gallery by sneering at Shelley's vegetarianism, and playfully
describing him as an "eater of buns and raisins." It was also lamented
by Mr. Gosse that Shelley, as a "hater of kings," had an attraction for
"revolutionists," a set of persons with whom Mr. Gosse would have