one of the very few English poets to have been taken to
heart by many workers in the Labour Movement. The
ideas which agitated him so violently are, for the most part,
still living issues, and that is perhaps why we are almost as
far from making a final evaluation of his work to-day as
critics were a hundred years ago. Owing to his early death,
the anxiety of his widow to preserve every fragment of his
poetry, and his carelessness as an artist, his Collected Works
are like a garden in which the weeds choke a good many of
the flowers. His faults militate against his virtues, and his
life work is a muddied stream. And his personal life--
his youthful rebelliousness against his father, his atheism
which caused him to be expelled from Oxford, his first
marriage followed by the suicide of his young wife, his
tangled relationships with people as different as his Oxford
friend Hogg and the father-in-law of his second marriage,
Godwin--make his character as controversial as his poetry.

The name Shelley, shining a bright but blurred light in
our minds, means at least three strains so intertwined that it
is difficult to separate them: his revolutionary theories; his
personal life; and his poems.

Vivid reminiscences of Shelley were written by his
friends Hogg, Peacock, and Trelawny. It is these por-
trayals which have created the legend of a frenetic, excitable
youth given to ecstatic enthusiasms and subject to hallucina-
tions. Wild as Shelley doubtless was, one must take into
account that each of these studies was coloured by senti-
ments aroused in the writer by Shelley. Hogg Life of
Shelley is the work of a man who feels that at a certain
moment he betrayed an idyllic friendship; but that in so
doing he took the first step towards growing up into the
rather successful, practical lover of the world, who later
looks back with a certain irony on the 'divine poet'.
Peacock, before writing his recollections of Shelley, in
which gentle mockery spreads rainbow lights of affection,
had already created two satiric portraits of him in novels:
as Mr. Foster in Headlong Hall, and Skythrop, the poet who

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