'necessity' which happened at the moment to have hold of him. Then, when things did not commence nor show the slightest sign of commencing, he fell into the blackest pessimism, and only roused himself from it to indulge in versified fairy-tales, where he could manipulate everything according to his fantasy. He was right and he was wrong, therefore: nearer the truth than Wordsworth and Coleridge, further away than Byron and (on his own special side) than Keats. It was the same with his efforts after a social circle. Matthew Arnold has drawn a justly derisive picture of Shelley's associates ('What a set! what a life!' and so on), but concludes with making one of his unctuous personal appeals to Cardinal Newman as a witness in favour of better things elsewhere. This is that Cardinal Newman of whom Carlyle remarked that he had 'no more brains than a rabbit'; and it is unlikely that Carlyle would have contented himself with even such criticism of the members of Newman's 'set.' Shelley's 'set' may have been this or that, and his 'life' may have been that or this, but at least he continually sought for a society that had in it a stream of ideas, that had an outlook on to the future, that could animate and sustain his creative and critical faculties; and he would have found nothing of the sort with the Wordsworths or the Southeys or the Coleridges, any more than years later with
