“At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God’s own heart?”

English writer and Romantic poet

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet and writer. He lived from 1792 to 1822, and is remembered as one of the major figures of English Romanticism. Shelley wrote with a radical edge in both his poetry and his political and social thought. He did not gain wide fame in his lifetime, but his reputation grew steadily after his death, and he later influenced poets such as Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats.