It would be very difficult to compose a formal biography of Shelley, because he was such a vague, imaginative, inconsistent creature.  The documentary evidence is often wholly contradictory, for the simple reason that Shelley had no conception of accuracy.  He did not, I am sure, deliberately invent what was not true; but he had a very lively imagination, and was capable of amplifying the smallest hints into elaborate theories; his memory was very faulty, and he could construct a whole series of mental pictures which were wholly inconsistent with facts.  It seems clear, too, that he was much under the influence of opium at various times, and that his dreams and fancies, when he was thus affected, presented themselves to him as objective facts.  But, for all that, it is not at all difficult to form a very real impression of the man.  He was one of those strange, unbalanced creatures that never reach maturity; he was a child all his short life; he had the generosity, the affection, the impulsiveness of a child, and he had, too, the timidity, the waywardness, the excitability of a child.  If a project came into his mind, he flung himself into it with the whole force of his nature; it was imperatively necessary that he should at once execute his design.  No considerations of prudence or common-sense availed to check him; life became intolerable to him if he could not gratify his whim.  His abandonment of his first wife, his elopement with Mary Godwin, are instances of this; what could be more amazing than his deliberate invitation to his first wife, after his flight with Mary, that she should come and join the party in a friendly way?  He preserved, too, that characteristic of the child, when confronted with a difficult and disagreeable situation, of saying anything that came into his head which seemed to offer a solution; the child does not invent an elaborate falsification; it simply says whatever will untie the knot quickest, without reference to facts.  If we bear in mind this natural and instinctive childlikeness in Shelley, we have the clue to almost all his inconsistencies and entanglements.  Most people, as they grow up, and as the complicated fabric of society makes itself clear to them, begin to arrange their life in sympathy with conventional ideals.  They learn that if they gratify their inclinations unreservedly, they will have a heavy price to pay; and on the whole they find it more convenient to recognise social limitations, and to get what pleasure they can inside the narrow enclosure.  But Shelley never grasped this fact.  He believed that all the difficulties of life and most of its miseries would melt away if only people would live more in the light of simple instinct and impulse.  He never had any real knowledge of human beings.  The history of his life is the history of a series of extravagant admirations for people, followed by no less extravagant disillusionments.  Of course, his circumstances fostered his tendencies.  Though