cruelty, death was the punishment for the theft of a loaf or a
sheep. The social organism had come to a deadlock--on the one
hand a starved and angry populace, on the other a vast
Church-and-King party, impregnably powerful, made up of all who
had "a stake in the country." The strain was not to be
relieved until the Reform Act of 1832 set the wheels in motion
again; they then moved painfully indeed, but still they moved.
Meanwhile Parliament was the stronghold of selfish interests;
the Church was the jackal of the gentry; George III, who lost
the American colonies and maintained negro slavery, was on the
throne, until he went mad and was succeeded by his profligate
son.

Shelley said of himself that he was

"A nerve o'er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of this earth,"

and all the shades of this dark picture are reflected in his
life and in his verse. He was the eldest son of a Sussex
family that was loyally Whig and moved in the orbit of the
Catholic Dukes of Norfolk, and the talk about emancipation
which he would hear at home may partly explain his amazing
invasion of Ireland in 1811-12, when he was nineteen years old,
with the object of procuring Catholic emancipation and the
repeal of the Union Act--subjects on which he was quite
ignorant. He addressed meetings, wasted money, and distributed
two pamphlets "consisting of the benevolent and tolerant
deductions of philosophy reduced into the simplest language."
Later on, when he had left England for ever, he still followed