Compare below, p.

325.] Amelioration was indeed to be effected by slow and cautious reforms, with the aid of the Church, but the intellectual aberrations of his youth had left an abiding impression.
While these poets were sitting at Godwin's feet, Shelley was still a child.

But he came across Political Justice at Eton; in his later life he reread it almost every year; and when he married Godwin's daughter he was more Godwinian than Godwin himself.

Hazlitt, writing in 1814, says that Godwin's reputation had "sunk below the horizon," but Shelley never ceased to believe in his theory, though he came to see that the regeneration of man would be a much slower process than he had at first imagined.

In the immature poem Queen Mab the philosophy of Godwin was behind his description of the future, and it was behind the longer and more ambitious poems of his maturer years.