^* As I shall not return to this charge of ‘blasphemy’, I will here cite a notable instance of what does seem permissible in that line to the English reader. (I need not say that I do not question the right, which hypocrisy and servility would deny, of author and publisher to express and produce what they please. I do not deprecate, but demand for all men freedom to speak and freedom to hear. It is the line of demarcation which admits, if offence there be, the greater offender and rejects the less – it is this that I do not understand.) After many alternate curses and denials of God, a great poet talks of Christ ‘veiling his horrible Godhead’, of his ‘malignant soul’, his ‘godlike malice’.¹³ Shelley outlived all this and much more; but Shelley wrote all this and much more. Will no Society for the Suppression of Common Sense – no Committee for the Propagation of Cant – see to it a little? or have they not already tried their hands at it and broken down? For the poem which contains the words above quoted continues at this day to bring credit and profit to its publishers – Messrs. Moxon and Co.

^* Witness Shelley’s version:–

‘A sexless thing it was, and in its growth

It seemed to have developed no defect

Of either sex, yet all the grace of both;

In gentleness and strength its limbs were decked;

The bosom lightly swelled with its full youth,

The countenance was such as might select

Some artist, that his skill should never die,

Imaging forth such perfect purity.’

Witch of Atlas, st. xxxvi.

But Shelley had not studied purity in the school of reviewers. It is well for us that we have teachers able to enlighten our darkness, or Heaven knows into what error such as he, or such as I, might not fall. We might even, in time, come to think it possible to enjoy the naked beauty of a statue or a picture without any virtuous vision behind it of a filthy fancy: which would be immoral.