At The Smart Set, Paula Marantz Cohen ponders what is laughingly known as the “character” of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley:

The exhibition “Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet,” now at the New York Public Library, is the sort of exhibit that doesn’t necessarily tell you anything you didn’t already know about this poet’s short and messy life. What it does do, by virtue of placing the manuscripts and artifacts into a relatively confined space (the smallish gallery to the left of the main exhibition room on the ground floor of the Library), is give us the facts in a more concentrated and vivid way than we might otherwise receive them. The exhibit demonstrates, with dramatic succinctness, that Percy Bysshe Shelley and some of those he hung out with were pretty [expletive deleted] people.

I’ve always had it in for Shelley, Byron, and that whole set. There’s something about them that, for me, encapsulates the most obvious hypocrisy within (I won’t say of) liberalism—the kind of persons who justify lives of complete selfishness through the loud proclamation of principles which [they insist] promote the improvement of society as a whole. It’s the moral equivalent of “I gave at the office.”

I’m not saying that all, or even most, liberals are like this. I know there are many liberals who deny themselves in order to live consistently with their principles. It’s just that when conservatives get caught in this kind of behavior (and heaven knows they do) they tend to be discredited and to lose their jobs. Liberals get a slap on the wrist at most, and go on to write bestselling books, star in movies, or have long, powerful political careers.

Or [and] they get memorialized, like Shelley, as secular saints.

Tip: The American Culture