Percy Bysshe Shelley pocket was a small book of Keats' poetry. Upon hearing this, Byron (never one to give compliments) said of Shelley: "I never met a man who wasn't a beast in comparison to him" . The day after the news of his death reached England, the Tory newspaper "The Courier" printed: "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; "now" he knows whether there is God or no." A reclining statue of Shelley's body, depicted as washed up on the shore, created by sculptor Edward Onslow Ford at the behest of Shelley's daughter-in-law, Jane, Lady Shelley, is the centrepiece
Percy Bysshe Shelley based on his poems. Critics such as Matthew Arnold endeavoured to rewrite Shelley's legacy to make him seem a lyricist and a dilettante who had no serious intellectual position and whose longer poems were not worthy of study. Arnold famously described Shelley as a "beautiful and ineffectual angel". This position contrasted strongly with the judgement of the previous generation who knew Shelley as a sceptic and a radical. Many of Shelley's works remained unpublished or little known after his death, with longer pieces such as "A Philosophical View of Reform" existing only in manuscript until the 1920s. This contributed to