The position of Rogers may be best illustrated in the words of Sir J. Mackintosh, in which he says:  “He appeared at the commencement of this literary revolution, without paying court to the revolutionary tastes, or seeking distinction by resistance to them.”  His works are not destined to live freshly in the course of literature, but to the historical student they mark in a very pleasing manner the characteristics of his age.

PERCY B. SHELLEY.—­Revolutions never go backward; and one of the greatest characters in this forward movement was a gifted, irregular, splendid, unbalanced mind, who, while taking part in it, unconsciously, as one of many, stands out also in a very singular individuality.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on the 4th of August, 1792, at Fieldplace, in Sussex, England.  He was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, and of an ancient family, traced back, it is said, to Sir Philip Sidney.  When thirteen years old he was sent to Eton, where he began to display his revolutionary tendencies by his resistance to the fagging system; and where he also gave some earnest in writing of his future powers.  At the age of sixteen he entered University College, Oxford, and appeared as a radical in most social, political, and religious questions.  On account of a paper entitled The Necessity of Atheism, he was expelled from the university and went to London.  In 1811 he made a runaway match with Miss Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of the keeper of a coffee-house, which brought down on him the wrath of his father.  After the birth of two children, a separation followed; and he eloped with Miss Godwin in 1814.  His wife committed suicide in 1816; and then the law took away from him the control of his children, on the ground that he was an atheist.

After some time of residence in England, he returned to Italy, where soon after he met with a tragical end.  Going in an open boat from Leghorn to Spezzia, he was lost in a storm on the Mediterranean:  his body was washed on shore near the town of Via Reggio, where his remains were burned in the presence of Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and others.  The ashes were afterwards buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome in July, 1822.

Shelley’s principles were irrational and dangerous.  He was a transcendentalist of the extreme order, and a believer in the perfectability of human nature.  His works are full of his principles.  The earliest was Queen Mab, in which his profanity and atheism are clearly set forth.  It was first privately printed, and afterwards published in 1821.  This was followed by Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, in 1816.  In this he gives his own experience in the tragical career of the hero.  His longest and most pretentious poem was The Revolt of Islam, published in 1819.  It is in the Spenserian stanza.  Also, in the same year, he published The Cenci, a tragedy, a dark and gloomy story on what should be a forbidden subject, but very powerfully written.  In 1820 he also published The Prometheus Unbound, which is full of his irreligious views.  His remaining works were smaller poems, among which may be noted Adonais, and the odes To the Skylark and The Cloud.