“Let not too much, however, be expected from this system. The healthiest among us is not exempt from hereditary disease. The most symmetrical, athletic, and long-lived is a being inexpressibly inferior to what he would have been, had not the unnatural habits of his ancestors accumulated for him a certain portion of malady and deformity. In the most perfect specimen of civilised man, something is still found wanting by the physiological critic. Can a return to Nature, then, instantaneously eradicate predispositions that have been slowly taking root in the silence of innumerable Ages? Undoubtedly not. All that I contend for is, that from the moment of relinquishing all unnatural habits no new disease is generated; and that the predisposition to hereditary maladies gradually perishes for want of its accustomed supply. In cases of consumption, cancer, gout, asthma, and scrofula, such is the invariable tendency of a diet of vegetables and pure water....”
He concludes this philosophic discourse with an earnest appeal to the various classes of society:—
“I address myself not to the young enthusiast only, to the ardent devotee of truth and virtue—the pure and passionate moralist, yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. He will embrace a pure system from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit. Unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct. It will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind that beings, capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies, should take delight in the deathpangs and last convulsions of dying animals.
“The elderly man, whose youth has been poisoned by intemperance, or who has lived with apparent moderation, and is afflicted with a variety of painful maladies, would find his account in a beneficial change, produced without the risk of poisonous medicines. The mother, to whom the perpetual restlessness of disease, and unaccountable deaths incident to her children, are the causes of incurable unhappiness, would, on this diet, experience the satisfaction of beholding their perpetual health and natural playfulness.[239] The most valuable lives are daily destroyed by diseases that it is dangerous to palliate, and impossible to cure, by medicine. How much longer will man continue to pimp for the gluttony of Death—his most insidious, implacable, and eternal foe?”
Some time after the melancholy death of his first wife, Shelley married Mary Wolstoncroft, the daughter of William Godwin, author of Political Justice—perhaps the most revolutionary of all pleas for a change in the constitution of society that has ever proceeded from a prosaic tradesman, such as, in the ordinary intercourse of life and interchange of ideas, his biography and correspondence (lately published) prove him to have been. Her mother was the celebrated and earliest advocate of the rights of women. Previously, the lovers had travelled through France and part of Germany, and an account of their six weeks’ tour was afterwards printed by Mrs. Shelley.
In 1815 appeared his Alastor; or the Spirit of Solitude. In 1817 he again left England for Geneva. While in Switzerland he made the acquaintance of Byron, which was renewed during his stay in Italy. In the same year he returned to this country and, after a short sojourn with Leigh Hunt, he settled at Great Marlow, one of the most picturesque parts of the Thames. There, in spite of his own ill-health, he showed the active benevolence of his character, not only in the easier form of alms-giving but also in frequent visits to the sick and destitute, at the risk of aggravating symptoms of consumption now alarmingly apparent. There, too, he composed the Revolt of Islam, or, as it was originally more fitly entitled, Laon and Cythna. In this poem, by the mouth of Laone, he again expresses his humanitarian convictions and sympathies. She calls upon the enfranchised nations:—
“‘My brethren, we are free! The fruits are glowing
Beneath the stars, and the night-winds are flowing
O’er the ripe corn; the Birds and Beasts are dreaming—