Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/191

Rh the pitiful company of the Puseys and Newmans and Kebles. He found Byron, however, who, with all his dreadful limitations, was the one great man then alive in England; and he appreciated all that was best, not only in Wordsworth and Coleridge, but also in Keats. No other man of his time had a taste so catholic. He could not help feeling whatever was new and true. None of the others, except Keats, had a tithe of his receptivity, a tithe of his sincerity. Keats advised him to 'curb his magnanimity and become more of an artist,' and the advice was the best he could have had. Goethe could not have diagnosed his case more infallibly, or have prescribed a more certain cure for his disease. But Shelley, like the rest of us, could only be what he was, the circumstances being unhappy. What he might have become it is impossible to say and idle to speculate. Our sole concern is with what he was.

Towards the close he showed signs of a sounder power of estimation; but what did it amount to? He was going off on the tack of the scholarly recluse, complicated by the old wild outbursts, and who is more ignorant of life than the scholar, and especially the sensitive scholar? He was so easily drawn into adventures of a sort that was fatal to him. The Gambas and Emilia Viviani—Williams and Mrs. Williams—revolutionary skirmishes and rapt