And, while he thus criticised the defective morality of writers whom he greatly admired, he was, perhaps naturally, still more severe on the moral defects of those whom he esteemed less highly.  “Burns,” he said, “is a beast, with splendid gleams, and the medium in which he lived, Scotch peasants, Scotch Presbyterianism, and Scotch drink, is repulsive.”  On Coleridge, critic, poet, philosopher, his judgment was that he “had no morals,” and that his character inspired “disesteem, nay, repugnance.”  Bulwer-Lytton he thought a consummate novel-writer, but “his was by no means a perfect nature”—­“a strange mixture of what is really romantic and interesting with what is tawdry and gimcracky.” Villette he pronounced “disagreeable, because the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore that is all she can put into her book.”  Of Harriet Martineau, the other of the “two gifted women,” whose exploits he had glorified in Haworth Churchyard, he wrote in later years that she had “undeniable talent, energy, and merit,” but “what an unpleasant life and unpleasant nature!”

And, so everywhere the moral element—­the sense for Conduct—­mingles itself with his literary judgment.  But it was in his attack on Shelley, written within four months of his own death, that he most vigorously displayed his detestation of moral shortcomings, and his sense of their poisonous effect on the performances of genius.  “In this article on Shelley,” he wrote, “I have spoken of his life, not his poetry.  Professor Dowden was too much for my patience."[33] It can hardly be questioned that the publication of that biography did a signal disservice to the memory of the poet whom Professor Dowden idolized.  The lack of taste, judgment, and humour which pervades the book, and its complete, though of course unintended, condonation of heinous evil, deserved a severe castigation, and Arnold bestowed it with a vigour and a thoroughness which show how deeply his moral sense had been shocked.  “What a set! what a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of ’the occurrences of Shelley’s private life.’ ...  Godwin’s house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and holding the hat, and the green-spectacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg the faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this precious world!”

Fresh from pursuing, step by step, Professor Dowden’s grim narrative of seduction and suicide, with its ludicrous testimony to Shelley’s “conscientiousness,” Arnold says, with honest indignation, “After reading his book, one feels sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relations....  I conclude that an entirely human inflammability, joined to an inhuman want of humour and a super-human power of self-deception, are the causes which chiefly explain Shelley’s abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and then his behaviour to her and defence of himself afterwards.”