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After a few weeks, Mr. Godwin, bachelor, aged forty, found himself very much in love with Mary Wollstonecraft and her baby. Her absolute purity of purpose, her frankness, honesty and high ideals surpassed anything he had ever dreamed of finding incarnated in woman. He became her sincere lover; and she, the discarded, the forsaken, reciprocated; for it seems that the tendrils of affection, ruthlessly uprooted, cling to the first object that presents itself.

And so they were married; yes, these two who had so generously repudiated the marriage-tie were married March Twenty-ninth, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, at Old Saint Pancras Church, for they had come to the sane conclusion that to affront society was not wise.

On August Thirtieth, in the year Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, was born to them a daughter. Then the mother died–died did brave Mary Wollstonecraft, and left behind a girl baby one week old. And it was this baby, grown to womanhood, who became Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

* * * * *

William Godwin wrote one great book: “Political Justice.” It is a work so high and noble in its outlook that only a Utopia could ever realize its ideals. When men are everywhere willing to give to other men all the rights they demand for themselves, and co-operation takes the place of competition, then will Godwin’s philosophy be not too great and good for daily food. Among the many who read his book and thought they saw in it the portent of a diviner day was one Percy Bysshe Shelley.

And so it came to pass that about the year Eighteen Hundred Thirteen, this Percy Bysshe Shelley called on Godwin, who was living in a rusty, musty tenement in Somerstown. The young man was twenty: tall and slender, with as handsome a face as was ever given to mortal. The face was pale as marble: the features almost feminine in their delicacy: thin lips, straight nose, good teeth, abundant, curling hair, and eyes so dreamy and sorrowful that women on the street would often turn and follow the “angel soul garbed in human form.”

This man Shelley was sick at heart, bereft, perplexed, in sore straits, and to whom should he turn for advice in this time of undoing but to Godwin, the philosopher! Besides, Godwin had been the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, and the splendid precepts of these two had nourished into being all the latent excellence of the youth. Yes, he would go to Godwin, the Plato of England!

And so he went to Godwin.

Now, this young man Shelley was of noble blood. His grandfather was Sir Bysshe Shelley, Bart., and worth near three hundred thousand pounds, all of which would some day come to our pale-faced youth. But the youth was a republican–he believed in the brotherhood of man. He longed to benefit his fellows, to lift them out of the bondage of fear, and sin, and ignorance. After reading Hume, and Godwin, and Wollstonecraft, he had decided that Christianity as defined by the Church of England was a failure: it was only an organized fetish, kept in place by the State, and devoid of all that thrills to noble thinking and noble doing.

And so young Shelley at Oxford had written a pamphlet to this end, explaining the matter to the world.

A copy being sent to the headmaster of the school, young Shelley was hustled off the premises in short order, and a note was sent to his father requesting that the lad be well flogged and kept several goodly leagues from Oxford.

Shelley the elder was furious that his son should so disgrace the family name, and demanded he should write another pamphlet supporting the Church of England and recanting all the heresy he had uttered. Young Percy replied that conscience would not admit of his doing this. The father said conscience be blanked: and further used almost the same words that were used by Professor Jowett some years later to a certain skeptical youth.