The pretension of authority to speak with a supernatural warrant provoked him to deny the warrant itself, or the sources from which it was said to emanate.

“Is there a God?—­ay, an almighty God,
And vengeful as almighty?  Once his voice
Was heard on earth; earth shuddered at the sound,
The fiery-visaged firmament expressed
Abhorrence, and the grave of Nature yawned
To swallow all the dauntless and the good
That dared to hurl defiance at his throne,
Girt as it was with power.  None but slaves
Survived,—­cold-blooded slaves, who did the work
Of tyrranous omnipotence.”

To these superstitious and ambitious pretensions he traced the corruption which disorganized society, leading it down even to the very worst immoralities.

“All things are sold:  the very light of heaven
Is venal.... 
Those duties which heart of human love
Should urge him to perform instinctively
Are bought and sold as in a public mart.

* * * * *

Even love is sold; the solace of all woe
Is turned to deadliest agony, old age
Shivers in selfish beauty’s loathing arms,
And youth’s corrupted impulses prepare
A life of horror from the blighting bane
Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs
From unenjoying sensualism has filled
All human life with hydra-headed woes.”

“Shelley,” says Mary, in her note on the poem, “was eighteen when he wrote ‘Queen Mab.’  He never published it.  When it was written, he had come to the decision that he was too young to be a judge of controversies.”  The wife-editor refers to a series of articles published in the “New Monthly Magazine” for 1832 by a fellow-collegian, a warm friend of Shelley’s, touching upon his school-life, and describing the state of his mind at college.  The worst of all these biographical sketches of remarkable men is, that delicacy, discretion, or some other euphemistically named form of hesitancy, induces writers to suppress the incidents which supply the very angles of the form they want to delineate; and it is especially so in Shelley’s case.  I am sure, that, if Mary, or my father, or any of those with whom Shelley conversed most thoroughly, had related some of the more extravagant incidents of his early life exactly as they occurred, we should better understand the tenor of his thought,—­and we should also have the most valuable complement to that part of his intellectual progress which stands in contrast with the earlier portion.  Now, as I have said, at school Shelley was a more practical and impracticable mutineer than his friends have generally allowed.  They have been anxious to soften his “faults”; and the consequence is, that we miss the force of the boy’s logic and the vigor of his Catonian experiments.