such conduct seriously; yet in the midst of much that was wild, his
pamphlets contained also much of solid wisdom, no small part of which has
since been enacted into law.

Unselfish as he was in the abstract, Shelley's enthusiast's egotism and the
unrestraint of his emotions rendered him fitful, capricious, unable to
appreciate any point of view but his own, and therefore when irritated or
excited capable of downright cruelty in concrete cases. The most painful
illustration is afforded by his treatment of his first wife. Three years
after his marriage he informed her that he considered the connection at an
end and abandoned her to what proved a few years of a wretched existence.
Shelley himself formed a union with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the
daughter of his revolutionary teacher. Her sympathetic though extravagant
admiration for his genius, now beginning to express itself in really great
poetry, was of the highest value to him, the more so that from this time on
he was viewed by most respectable Englishman with the same abhorrence which
they felt for Byron. In 1818 the Shelleys also abandoned England
(permanently, as it proved) for Italy, where they moved from place to
place, living sometimes, as we have said, with Byron, for whose genius, in
spite of its coarseness, Shelley had a warm admiration. Shelley's death
came when he was only thirty, in 1822, by a sudden accident--he was
drowned by the upsetting of his sailboat in the Gulf of Spezia, between
Genoa and Pisa. His body, cast on the shore, was burned in the presence of
Byron and another radical, Leigh Hunt, and the ashes were buried in the
Protestant cemetery just outside the wall of Rome, where Keats had been
interred only a year earlier.

Some of Shelley's shorter poems are purely poetic expressions of poetic
emotion, but by far the greater part are documents (generally beautiful
also as poetry) in his attack on existing customs and cruelties. Matthew