tion and unnatural drunkenness of destruction of the conquerors, the burning of the harvests, and the obliteration of the traces of cultivation. To this in civil war is to be added the sudden disruption of the bonds of social life, and father against son.' If there had never been war there could never have been tyranny in the world. Tyrants take advantage of the mechanical organization of armies to establish and defend their encroachments. It is thus that the mighty advantages of the French Revolution have been almost compensated by a succession of tyrants; for demagogues, oligarchies, usurpers, and legitimate kings are merely varieties of the same class from Robespierre to Louis XVIII.”

But the greatest evil resulting from war is that it creates a sentiment in favour of brute force, and diminishes our faith in moral influences.

"War waged from whatever motive extinguishes the sentiment of reason and justice in the mind. The motive is forgotten or only adverted to in a mechanical and habitual manner. A sentiment of confidence in brute force and in a contempt of death and danger is considered as the highest virtue, when in truth, however indispeusable to [virtue], they are merely the means and the instruments highly capable of being perverted to destroy the cause they were assumed to promote. It is a foppery the most intolerable to an amiable and philosophical mind. It is like what some reasoners have observed of religious faith-no fallacious and indirect motive to action can subsist in the mind without weakening the effect of those which are genuine and true. The person who thinks it virtuous to believe, will think a less degree of virtue attaches to good actions than if he had considered it indifferent. The person who has been accustomed to subdue men by force will be less inclined to the trouble of convincing or persuading them."

These considerations may make the true friend of mankind pause before he recommends measures tending towards the grievous calamity of war. "I imagine, however," adds Shelley, "that before the English nation shall arrive at that point of moral and political degradation now occupied by the Chinese, it will be necessary to appeal to an exertion of physical strength."

Here we have almost reached the end of the manuscript. A blank space of two leaves is left, and in the sentences of the last fragment Shelley contemplates the future victory of the people and the duties which accompany that victory.

"When the people shall have obtained by whatever means the victory over their oppressors, and when persons appointed by them shall have taken their seats in the Representative assembly of the nation, and assumed the control of public affairs according to constitutional rules, then will remain the great task of accommodating all that can be preserved of ancient forms with the improvements of the knowledge of a more enlightened age in legislation, jurisprudence, government, and religious and academical institutions. The settlement of the National Debt is, on the principles before elucidated, merely an affair of form, and however necessary and important, is an affair of mere arithmetical proportions readily determined; nor can I see how those who, being deprived of their unjust advantages, will probably inwardly murmur, can oppose one word of open expostulation to a measure of such irrefragable justice. There is one thing, which vulgar agitators endeavour to flatter the most uneducated part of the people by assiduously proposing, which they ought not to do nor to require-and that is Retribution.

"Men having been injured desire to injure in return. This is falsely called an universal law of human nature; it is a law from which many are exempt, and all in proportion to their virtue and cultivation. The savage is more revengeful than the civilised man, the ignorant and uneducated than the person of a refined and cultivated intellect, the generous and-

With which unfinished sentence the "Philosophical View of Reform " ends. It could close with no more sacred thought or word than that of reconciliation"word over all, beautiful as the sky."

LAST WORDS ON SHELLEY.

SOME critics of my "Life of Shelley," the reviewers, if I remember rightly, in The Times, the Athenæum, and the Quarterly Review, noticed with some surprise or regret the fact that I nowhere attempted to give a general view or estimate -a "synthesis" as one of them called it of Shelley's character, and genius, and work in literature. My reserve in this respect was of course not the result of accident; I felt, and still feel, that such deliberate reserve was right and wise. The writer of a short study may legitimately present a view in which generalisation has done its full work; he may reduce what is complex to a simple conception, and arrange a mass of various details under some dominant idea. But such ought not to be the procedure of a biographer, certainly not of a biographer whose aim is to paint a portrait, following at however great a distance those masters who have painted portraits in the great style. His synthesis must be implicit, and if it be present everywhere in a vital way, he will do well to leave it so, and allow others, if they please, to make it explicit. His general conception guides and governs his work from first to last, but at each moment he seems wholly occupied with the endeavour to set down faithfully the colours and the lines which he sees while his eyes are fixed upon some part of the object before him. It is

his desire to show a living creature and not an abstraction of the intellect; to display the opal with all its mingling hues, its luminous shadows, and cloudy brightnesses; to paint the pigeon's neck and all its shifting dyes, changeful with every stir of life. For the interpretation of human character an anecdote may be more valuable than a theory. Dead facts on the one hand and abstract ideas on the other are the Scylla and Charybdis of the biographer; between them lies his difficult way, in the flow of reality and living truth.

I had, to be sure, my own notion of Shelley, but whether it be philosophical enough to deserve the name of a synthesis I cannot say; it certainly had its origin in no partial survey or incomplete analysis of the facts. I thought of Shelley-so we all think of him-as a man of extraordinary sensitiveness and susceptibility, susceptibility above all to ideal impressions; and I further thought of him as instinctively craving something to balance his own excessive sensitiveness, something to control his mobility of feeling, something to steady his advance and give him poise. A law he needed, but a law which should steady his advance, not one which should trammel it or hold him in motionless equilibrium. Coming at a time when the ideas of the Revolution were in the air, he found what served him. as a law in those ideas, as declared by their most eminent English spokesman, William Godwin. A lyrical nature attempting to steady its advance by the revolutionary abstractions-such was Shelley. And his work in literature represents on the one hand his own mobile temperament, his extraordinary sensitiveness and

marvellous imagination, and on the other hand the zeit-geist, the spirit of 1789, as formulated by Godwin. in a code of morals, rigid, passionless, and doctrinaire, yet containing a hidden fire, and glowing inwardly with ardent anticipations. The volumes of "Political Justice" were thus for Shelley at once a law and a gospel.

By his temperament and constitution Shelley was little disposed to acquiesce in traditional and conventional ways of thought, presented to him, as these were in his own household, in a fashion which lacked real charm and inspiration. There lay in his instinctive feelings enough that was peculiar or singular to draw his understanding sideways from the paths of use and wont. What attracts the average boy did not attract Shelley; and when his feelings were driven into opposition, it was natural and indeed inevitable, that his intellect should go hand in hand with his feelings to interpret and justify them. Persecuted by the swarm of young marauders at Eton, he was driven in upon himself. Loosened from the moorings of traditional belief, if he ever had such moorings, he was prepared to accept a new gospel, and precisely at this moment Godwin's remarkable book fell into his hands. Many of us probably could tell, each from his own experience, how some one author or some one book, coming to us at a fortunate moment in youth, has been a key to unlock for us the mysteries of existence; how it has been to us the revelation sole and single of wisdom; how it has fed our highest feelings and shaped our desires and our resolves. Some of us have found in Wordsworth such a master, some perhaps in Carlyle, or Goethe, or Browning, or Newman, or George