Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

Henry David Thoreau's civil disobedience was apparently influenced by Shelley's non-violence in protest and political action. Their son Timothy Shelley of Fen Place (born c. "


Death

On 8 July 1822 less than a month before his 30th birthday Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Leghorn (Livorno) to Lerici in his schooner Don Juan.

Yeats Karl Marx Upton Sinclair and Isadora Duncan. Shelley became an idol of the next three or four generations of poets including important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Though Shelley's poetry and prose output remained steady throughout his life most publiPercy Bysshe Shelleyrs and journals declined to publish his work for fear of being arrested themselves for blasphemy or sedition.