The city of gold, of the Revolt of Islam, is Godwin's future society, and he describes that poem as "an experiment on the temper of the public mind as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live." As to Prometheus Unbound his biographer observes: [Footnote: Dowden, ib.ii.p.264.Elsewhere Dowden remarks on the singular insensibility of Shelley's mind "to the wisdom or sentiment of history" (i.p.

55).] All the glittering fallacies of "Political Justice"-- now sufficiently tarnished--together with all its encouraging and stimulating truths, may be found in the caput mortuum left when the critic has reduced the poetry of the "Prometheus" to a series of doctrinaire statements.
The same dream inspired the final chorus of Hellas.

Shelley was the poet of perfectibility.
8.
The attraction of perfectibility reached beyond the ranks of men of letters, and in Robert Owen, the benevolent millowner of Lanark, it had an apostle who based upon it a very different theory from that of Political Justice and became one of the founders of modern socialism.
The success of the idea of Progress has been promoted by its association with socialism.

[Footnote: The word was independently invented in England and France.

An article in the Poor Man's Guardian (a periodical edited by H.Hetherington, afterwards by Bronterre O'Brien), Aug.