Nowadays there are few professional critics who praise or condemn books for moral reasons. That custom, one of the virtues of the old Edinburgh, can be seen dying in the early Victorian reviews. For years critics have smiled good-humouredly at Dryden and Dr. Johnson for their preoccupation with moral values, and writers have laughed at Milton and Sir Philip Sidney for their desire to instruct and improve. But the decline is less noticeable among those who do not have to write for money, who receive their books, not with the publishers’ compliments, but through buying or borrowing, and are as a result more inclined to read them right through. Really most of us are ignorant of æsthetic principles: we are little interested in the Will o’ the Wisp incantations of La Poésie Pure, nor do we care to try the slippery path across the Crocean bog. To the disgust of those critics who wish us to judge by their own mysterious esoteric standards, most of us insist on having a little index of our own. There are many books, said to be masterpieces, which we object to for moral reasons, and will not, whatever their artistic merits, admit to our shelves. Against this attitude, which is at least as old as Aristotle, the professional critics have often fought in vain. Most of us still insist on liking books for other than purely aesthetic reasons, and, to make more popular a writer of whom he thinks highly, the critic has to stoop to our level.

The cause of the early neglect of Shelley’s poetry was certainly moral. He lived at a time when it was more than usually easy for a rather wild young man to make himself disliked. Most people were sick to death of the ‘new’ ideas which had fired the French Revolution and sustained the Napoleonic Wars.