Unpublished Passages from the Pforzheimer MS. of Shelley's Philosophical View of Reform

Extract

It is so much easier to understand a simple character, one that runs true to form, than to comprehend a peculiarly complex one, that I have always had a good deal of sympathy for poor old Timothy Shelley, weeping on the neck of his son's friend, Hogg, at Miller's Hotel in London, just after the Oxford expulsion. For Percy Bysshe Shelley, his poetic talent aside, was no ordinary scion to issue from the sedate portals of an English country home. Bred a Tory, he aligned himself with the Radical Reformers; reared in the Church of England, he published a tract on The Necessity of Atheism before he was twenty. Nor does the paradox end here. As the author of Prometheus Unbound and Epipsychidion he seems to us a “spirit that walked in a flaming robe of verse;” but the always-worldly Byron turned over to this spirit of fire and dew his financial negotiations with the wholly substantial John Murray; and this citizen of worlds of unimaginable beauty could turn in a moment from the composition of Alastor to discuss with the impecunious Godwin the least expensive means of borrowing on collateral.