THE REAL SHELLEY.
VOL. I.

THE REAL SHELLEY.

NEW VIEWS OF THE POET’S LIFE.

BY
JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON,
AUTHOR OF
‘THE REAL LORD BYRON,’ ‘A BOOK ABOUT DOCTORS,’
‘A BOOK ABOUT LAWYERS,’ &c. &c.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1885.
All Rights reserved.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY STRANGEWAYS AND SONS,
Tower Street, Upper St. Martin’s Lane.

CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

THE REAL SHELLEY.

CHAPTER I.

THE SHELLEY OF ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHY.

Creators of The Romantic Shelley—Clint’s Fanciful Composition—The Poet’s Personal Appearance—His Little Turn-up Nose—His Ancestral Quality—Sussexisms of his Speech and Poetry—His Phenomenal Untruthfulness—His Temperance and Intemperance—A Victim of Domestic Persecution—Was The Necessity of Atheism a mere Squib?—Lord Eldon’s Decree—The Slaughter of Reputations—The Poet’s Character—His Treatment of his familiar Friend—Biographic Fictions—Extravagances of Shelleyan Enthusiasm.

From a time considerably anterior to the day on which Hogg undertook to write the Life of his college friend, three separate forces,

(a) Field Place,

(b) The Shelleyan Enthusiasts,

(c) The Shelleyan Socialists,

have been steadily working to withdraw the Real Shelley from the world’s view, and to replace him with a Shelley, altogether unlike the poet, who carried Mary Godwin off to the Continent, and wrote Laon and Cythna.

By ‘Field Place,’ I mean those members of the poet’s family (living or dead), who in their pious devotion to his memory, and laudable concern for the honour of their house, have busied themselves in creating this fanciful and romantic Shelley, and substituting him for the Real Shelley. By designating these members of the Shelley family by the name of the house that is Shelley’s shrine, even as the Stratford birthplace is Shakespeare’s shrine, and Newstead Abbey is Byron’s shrine, I shall be able to refer with the least possible offensiveness to excellent individuals, from whom I am constrained to differ on a large number of Shelleyan questions.

By ‘The Shelleyan Enthusiasts,’ I mean vehement admirers of Shelley’s poetry, who, without ever thinking about his social views, delight in imagining that the poet’s character and career resembled his genius in its grandeur, and his song in its loftiness and beauty.

By ‘The Shelleyan Socialists’ I mean those conscientious though misguided persons, who, valuing Shelley for his mischievous social philosophy, and thinking of Marriage somewhat as the pious John Milton thought of it in the seventeenth century, and somewhat as the devout Martin Bucer thought of it in the sixteenth century, regard with various degrees of approval or tolerance Shelley’s daring, though by no means original, proposal for abolishing lawful marriage, and replacing it with the Free Contract, from which each of the contracting parties is free to retire on the death of their mutual affection, and who, in accordance with their various degrees of approval or tolerance of the proposal, have contributed or are contributing, by written words or by spoken words, either to the opinion that society should adopt the proposal, or to the opinion that, without abolishing lawful marriage, society should recognize the Free Contract as a kind of marriage, to the extent of holding persons who live under it conscientiously, as blameless or not greatly blameworthy for doing so.

The work of creating the romantic Shelley, and endowing him with personal and moral graces, never conspicuous in the real Shelley, was begun not long after the poet’s death, when Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams induced Clint to compose the fancy picture, to which the world is, through the engraver’s art, indebted for its very erroneous conception of Shelley’s personal aspect. Who has not, through the engraver’s art, gazed on the face of that charming portraiture: a face so remarkable for gentle delicacy and symmetrical loveliness? Gazing on the beauteous face, who has not observed the rather large, straight, delicately-modelled, finely-pointed nose?—The original of the lovely picture had a notably unsymmetrical face, and a little turn-up nose.

Having replaced his unsymmetrical visage with a face of exquisite symmetry, the cunning idolaters have introduced the poet as a gentleman of high ancestral dignity, to a world ever too quick to honour men of ancient gentility. His remote forefathers have been proclaimed persons of knightly rank and virtue. His house (founded though it was by a comparatively self-made man, who won his baronetcy years after the poet’s birth) has been declared a branch of the Michelgrove Shelleys. Cynics and humourists may well smile to recall all that has been written of the poet’s mediæval ancestors and his shield of twenty-one quarterings, whilst they remember at the same time that his grandfather was the younger son of a Yankee apothecary, that his earlier people of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries were undistinguished though gentle persons, the squireens and farmers, of whose claim to be rated with the great families of Sussex more will be said in a subsequent chapter.

Endowing him with aristocratic descent, the Shelleyan idolaters have discovered indications of nobility in the Sussex provincialisms that qualified the utterances of the poet’s singularly disagreeable voice, and may be now and then detected in his outpourings of song: provincialisms to remind the reader of Byron’s scarcely perceptible Scotch accent, and the Scotticisms of expression that are occasionally discoverable in his poems. The Sussex peasantry seldom sound the final g of words ending with that letter, and Sussex gentlemen are sometimes heard to say ‘Good mornin’ to one another.’ Shelley was sometimes guilty of this provincialism. For instance, in Laon and Cythna (1817), and again in Arethusa (1820), he makes ruin rhyme to pursuing. Mr. Buxton Forman regards the provincialism as an indication of the poet’s aristocratic quality. ‘I need not,’ says the enthusiastic editor, ‘tell the reader that, to this day, it is an affectation current among persons who are, or pretend to be, of the aristocratic caste, not only to drop the final g in these cases themselves, but to stigmatize its pronunciation by other people as “pedantic.”’

Englishmen like people to be truthful, and in the long-run never fail to honour the man, who, having the courage of his opinions, proclaims them fearlessly, even though they may quarrel with him for a season, because he tells the truth too pugnaciously, or persists in telling them truths they don’t wish to think about. To commend him to lovers of truth, the Shelleyan idolaters declare the poet to have been, from his boyhood till his death, daringly, unfalteringly, unwaveringly, invariably truthful. Lady Shelley insists that at Eton he was more truth-loving than other boys,—was, indeed, chiefly remarkable for unswerving and audacious veracity. In half-a-dozen different biographies he is extolled for his intolerance of falsehood. Most of the misfortunes that befel him are attributed to his habit of telling the truth in season and out of season. It is, indeed, admitted even by some of his panegyrists that he now and then made statements at variance with fact. But on these occasions he is declared to have spoken erroneously through the delusive influence of a too powerful imagination. The inordinately vigorous fancy, that enabled him to write Queen Mab, caused him sometimes to imagine things to have taken place, when they had not taken place. His mis-statements resulted altogether from misconception, and should not be regarded as in any way affecting the overwhelming evidence that he loved truth more than life; that he made great sacrifices for the truth’s sake, that he was, in fact, a martyr for the truth. It is, however, all too certain that he uttered mis-statements, for which the force of his imagination cannot in any degree whatever have been accountable; and that, instead of being more truth-loving than most men, he was phenomenally untruthful. Telling fibs in order to escape momentary annoyance or gain a trivial advantage, he could instruct other persons to tell fibs in his interest. He was singular amongst men of his degree for being able to declare his intention of practising deceit, and forthwith being as bad as his word. Instances of this candour in falsehood are given in the ensuing pages. When he tells a fib, a gentleman is usually too much ashamed of the matter to take any one into his confidence on the subject. There were times, when no such sense of shame troubled Shelley.

Much has been written to Shelley’s honour about his habitual temperance and general disregard for the pleasures of the table. It has been accounted to him for righteousness that he seldom drank wine, and for months together ate nothing but vegetable food. As Shelley at one period of his career found, or fancied, that his health was better, his mind lighter and more vigorous, his whole soul in higher contentment, when he lived wholly on vegetable food, than when he ate flesh, I cannot see why it was eminently virtuous in him to take the food that seemed to suit him best. As he drank fresh water and strong tea, because he liked them better than mild ale and stiff toddy, it remains to be shown why he should be so much commended for drinking what he liked best. Still temperance in diet is one of the minor virtues. But was Shelley a temperate man in his drinks? If he never drank wine immoderately, and in some periods of his career was a total abstainer from all the usual alcoholic drinks, it is certain that he was at times a heavy laudanum-drinker; and it is not obvious why it is less intemperate to be sottish with spirits of wine, in which opium has been macerated; than to be sottish with gin, in which gentian has been macerated.

Misrepresenting the poet’s story in the smaller matters, the Shelleyan apologists have misrepresented it even more daringly in the larger matters. Endeavouring to explain away his gravest academic offence, they maintain that The Necessity of Atheism was a trivial essay, a little argumentative syllabus, a humorous brochure, that did not exhibit his real opinions on matters pertaining to religion; that it was printed only for private circulation amongst the learned; that it was never offered for sale to the general public. Yet it is certain that he reproduced some of its argument in the Letter to Lord Ellenborough; that more than two years after its first publication, he revised, amended, and reprinted it in the notes to Queen Mab; that later still he reproduced some of its reasoning in the Refutation of Deism, and that it was offered for sale to anyone who cared to buy it at Oxford. Mr. Garnett declares the essay to have been nothing more than ‘a squib,’ and gives Hogg as his authority for the staggering statement. Yet it is certain that Hogg makes no such statement; but is, on the contrary, most careful and precise in declaring how completely earnest and sincere Shelley was in the matter. Declaring that the essay was no expression of the author’s genuine opinions, the Shelleyan apologists almost in the same breath declare it to have been an utterance of his real convictions, and applaud him for his courage in putting forth clearly what he believed to be true.

One of the prime biographic fictions about Shelley is, that he endured persecution for publishing this equally sincere and insincere profession of no faith, not only at Oxford but in his domestic circle. It is asserted that he was treated cruelly by his father, excluded from Field Place, driven from his boyhood’s home, and even disinherited, for this and other bold declarations of what he believed to be true. Sympathy and admiration are demanded for him as a martyr for the truth’s sake. ‘On the sensitively affectionate feelings of the young controversialist and poet,’ Lady Shelley says, ‘this sentence of exclusion from his boyhood’s home inflicted a bitter pang, yet he was determined to bear it for the sake of what he believed to be right and true.’ With the perplexing perversity that characterised so many of his utterences about his private affairs, Shelley himself, after surrendering by his own act, and of his own will, the position assigned to him in respect to his grandfather’s property by his grandfather’s will, used to speak of himself as having made great sacrifices of his material interests for the truth, and to offer himself to the sympathy and admiration of his friends as a martyr for conscience’s sake. Yet it is certain that he was treated kindly by his father in respect to the causes and immediate consequences of his academic disgrace; that he was excluded from Field Place in the first instance, not on account of his religious opinions, but on account of his outrageous disregard for his father’s wishes in respect to other matters; that he was excluded from Field Place in 1811 only for a few weeks, during which time so far from ‘being determined to bear it for the sake of what he believed to be right and true,’ he never for a moment designed to respect the sentence of banishment, but intended to return to his boyhood’s home as soon as it should please him to do so; and that, the few weeks of discord having passed, he was received at Field Place by his father and endowed with a handsome yearly allowance of pocket-money. No less certain is it that he was never driven from his boyhood’s home; that on eventually withdrawing from the old domestic circle, he left it of his own accord, to make a runaway match with a licensed victualler’s daughter; and that, instead of resulting from differences of opinion on questions of religion and politics (differences which at most only aggravated and embittered a quarrel due to other causes), his estrangement from and rupture with his family resulted from (1) their reasonable displeasure at his mésalliance, and (2) the reasonable displeasure of his grandfather, and father, at his refusal to concur with them in effecting a particular settlement of certain real estate.

To give yet another example of the audacious way in which Shelley’s story has been mistold in respect to its principal incidents. Every one has heard how Shelley was deprived of the custody of his children by Lord Eldon; how, on account of his religious opinions, and for no other cause, he was robbed of his dear babes by the cruel and fanatical Lord Chancellor. Lady Shelley speaks furiously of ‘the monstrous injustice of this decree.’ In an article, written to the lively gratification of the Shelleyan Enthusiasts and the Shelleyan Socialists, the Edinburgh Review not long since (October, 1882) declared that the judgment was formed and the decree delivered, ‘on the ground, not of Shelley’s misconduct to his wife, but of the opinions expressed in his writings.’ The words of the Edinburgh Reviewer are absolutely erroneous. The judgment was formed in steady consideration of the poet’s misconduct to his first wife; and in its delivery the Chancellor was careful to say, not once, but repeatedly, that he decreed against the poet’s petition, not on account of any opinions expressed in his writings (considered apart from conduct), but on account of his conduct (the word conduct, conduct, conduct, being reiterated by the Chancellor, till the reader of the decree grows weary of it)—on account of his conduct in respect to his wife; conduct showing his resolve to act on the Free Contract principles, set forth in the anti-matrimonial note to Queen Mab; conduct justifying the opinion that if Harriett Westbrook’s children were delivered to him, he would rear them to hold his own anti-matrimonial views. That so respectable an organ of public opinion should make this statement is significant. It indicates how great is the force with which I venture to contend, not without hope that my weak hands may be strengthened by all who reverence marriage.

A matter to be noticed, in connection with the efforts to substitute the romantic for the Real Shelley, is that their success will involve the discredit, if not the absolute infamy, of nearly all the principal persons, whom the poet encountered in friendship or enmity, on his way from birth to death. To accept the extravagant stories told by Shelley or his idolaters is to believe, that the poet’s father was a prodigy of parental wickedness; that his mother was hatefully deficient in maternal affection; that Dr. Greenlaw was a malicious, base-natured pedagogue; that the Eton masters (from Dr. Keate to Mr. Bethell) delighted in persecuting their famous pupil; that the Master and Fellows of University College were actuated by the basest motives (including sycophancy to a powerful minister) in requiring the poet to leave Oxford; that Hogg was a nauseous villain, who attempted to seduce his friend’s wife within a few weeks of her wedding-day; that the first Mrs. Shelley broke her marriage-vow; that William Godwin, instead of feeling like the honest man he affected to be at his daughter’s flight, chuckled in his sleeve at his girl’s good fortune in winning a rich baronet’s son for her paramour and eventual husband; that Lord Chancellor Eldon was an unjust judge, who delivered a monstrous decree at the instigation of religious bigotry and political resentment; that Peacock was either a simpleton or traitor in bearing testimony to the first Mrs. Shelley’s conjugal goodness; that William Jerdan was a virulent slanderer; that Sir John Taylor Coleridge was a malignant calumniator; that Byron, whom Shelley throughout successive years honoured as a supremely great man, and for a while worshipt as a god, was the meanest, paltriest, dirtiest knave that ever broke a sacred trust, and stole a letter. It is thus that the creators of the romantic Shelley deal with the persons most influential on the poet’s career and reputation. It is true they have good words for the hard-swearing Windsor apothecary, who gave the Etonian Shelley lessons in commination and chemistry; and for Leigh Hunt, the equally insatiable and charming parasite, who took all he could get from his young friend’s pocket. The Squire of Field Place, Dr. Greenlaw, Dr. Keate, Mr. Bethell, the Master and Tutors of University College, Hogg, William Godwin, Lord Eldon, Peacock, William Jerdan, Sir John Taylor Coleridge, Byron, were all odious in different ways. The only good and true men, of all the many notable men, Shelley encountered on his way through life, were Dr. Lind and Leigh Hunt. Surely there must be something wrong in the story, that slays so many reputations, whilst it selects Dr. Lind and Leigh Hunt for approval.

Were there not another and very different side to the story, this book would not have been written. Unless I read it amiss (and I am sure I read it aright, for I have studied it carefully, and in doing so have found it to have been perused only in parts, and in some parts with strange carelessness, by all previous biographers), it stands out clear upon the record, that from his boyhood Shelley was disposed to rise in rebellion against all persons placed in authority over him; that instead of having the gentle nature attributed to him by fanciful historians, he was quick-tempered and resentful; that without being desperately wicked, his heart was strangely deceitful towards himself; that he was a bad and disloyal son to a kind-hearted and well-intentioned father, and by no means a good son to a gentle-natured and conscientious mother; that he was a bad husband to his first wife, and far from a faultless husband to his second wife; that, together with several agreeable characteristics, he possessed several dangerous qualities; and that he was, at least towards one person, a bad friend.

So strangely has Shelley’s story been mistold, that this last assertion is likely to make readers start with surprise and revolt against the author. Let it, therefore, be justified at once. The poet had a familiar friend, from whom he had received much kindness, for whom he professed cordial veneration, and with whom he lived in close intimacy. This friend had an only daughter, a bright, lively, romantic, lovely girl, still only sixteen years old. Reared within the lines of religious orthodoxy, this young girl had been educated to think of marriage just as other young English girls are usually taught to think of it. Though he had in former time been an advocate of the Free Contract, her father had changed his views about marriage before her birth, and had abandoned his Free Contract views when she was still a nursling. Soon after making this girl’s acquaintance, Shelley passed into discord with his wife; and soon after ceasing to love his wife, he fixed his affections on his friend’s daughter. Without speaking to his friend on the subject, or giving him occasion to suspect what he was about, Shelley paid his addresses to this child, and had won her heart, ere ever it occurred to her father that they might be living too intimately and affectionately with one another. It was with great difficulty Shelley overcame the child’s notions of right in which she had been educated; but, eventually, he accomplished his purpose. A few days later, leaving his wife in England, Shelley stole this young child from her home, and, carrying her off to the Continent, lived with her as though she were his wife. He did this, though she was his most intimate friend’s only daughter, though she was only sixteen years old, and though he had no prospect of ever being able to marry her. The creators of the romantic Shelley deal with this episode of Shelley’s story as though it were a pleasant and unusually interesting love-passage. Some of them are unable to see that Shelley was at all to blame in the business. Those of them, who admit it was not altogether right of him to act thus towards so young a girl, maintain that the author of such superlatively fine poetry as Adonais and The Cenci cannot have been very wrong in the affair, and should not be judged in respect to the matter, as though he were a young man incapable of writing fine poetry. No one of them has a word of compassion for the girl’s father. Mr. Froude is of opinion that in this matter Shelley was guilty of nothing worse than ‘the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty,’ and should be judged tenderly, because he was young and enthusiastic! Differing from Mr. Froude, I venture to say that, in acting thus ill towards the girl, Shelley was guilty of very hateful treason towards his friend. I ask English fathers with young children about them, and English brothers with young sisters for playmates, to judge between me and my adversary.

Since it dismissed Hogg with scant courtesy for being too realistic and communicative, Field Place has done much to gratify the Shelleyan enthusiasts and socialists. Soon after publishing the uniformly erroneous Shelley Memorials, Field Place promised to produce, in due season, evidence that Shelley was not seriously to blame in his treatment of his first wife. For years Field Place has gathered evidences for the poet’s vindication. Field Place aided Mr. Buxton Forman in producing his stately and careful edition of the poet’s works. In comparatively recent time the Field Place muniments have enabled a well-known writer to produce the memoir of the poet’s father-in-law (William Godwin), and a memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft, in which she is styled Gilbert Imlay’s wife, and is said to have thought herself his wife before God and man, though they were never married. And now Field Place is enabling another writer to produce another authoritative history of Shelley and Mary, that shall raise Mary Godwin yet nearer to the angels, and bring her husband’s story into more perfect harmony with the straight nose and symmetrical lineaments of Clint’s composition.

It is not surprising that Field Place should wish to produce some more adequate memoir of its poet than Lady Shelley’s Shelley Memorials; from Authentic Sources. But however cleverly it may be executed, only the most hopeful can hope that the promised biography will afford satisfaction to the general public. It is simply impossible for it to satisfy those who want the truth about Shelley, and at the same time to satisfy the enthusiasts who would be pained by the truth, and the Shelleyan Socialists who are chiefly desirous that the truth should not be told. To satisfy those who want the truth and the whole of it: to produce a memoir that shall be worth the paper on which it is printed, it will be necessary for the official biographer to show that Lady Shelley’s work is from first to last a book of mistakes—that it is wrong in every page; wrong in its views of the poet’s character; wrong in its general outline of his career; wrong in its incidents; wrong in its names and dates; wrong, even in its particulars of domestic affairs, legal matters, and pecuniary arrangements—particulars in respect to which a biographer, with access to authentic sources of information, has no excuse for blundering. Can such candour be looked for from the source which gave us the Shelley Memorials? Is it conceivable that the new official scribe will be permitted to deal thus honestly with Lady Shelley’s book from authentic sources? If he is required to make his book agree with this thing from authentic sources, he must dismiss the hope of pleasing the general public.

On the other hand, to please the enthusiasts and the more fervid Shelleyan Socialists he must tell that Shelley was sinless, stainless, divine; that Mary Wollstonecraft was married, in the sight of God and man, to the American adventurer, who never married her; and that Mary Godwin showed a justifiable disregard of social prejudices, when she went off to Switzerland with another woman’s husband. He must produce a work more or less calculated to illuminate the English people out of their reverence for marriage, and educate them into a philosophical tolerance of the Free Contract. Nothing less thorough will appear to the more fervid of the Shelleyan Socialists a sufficient vindication of the poet’s superhuman excellence.

For in these days, to please both sets of zealots, it is not enough for a biographer to delight in Shelley’s verse; to render homage to his genius; to think him—as all men of culture and poetical sensibility concur in thinking him—the brightest, most strenuous, and most musical of lyric poets; and at the same time, taking a charitable view of his failings and indiscretions, to palliate them in all honest ways, or look away from them, when they admit of no honest palliation. This is not enough for the enthusiasts, who insist that the poet’s character and career were altogether in harmony with his art. It only exasperates the most strenuous of the social innovators, who honouring him for his social philosophy even more than for his poetry, have no word of cordial censure, and scarcely a word of regret, for the way in which he acted on ‘his emotional theories of liberty.’ Readers must not blink the fact, that the more able and resolute of the Shelleyan enthusiasts recognize in Shelley a great social teacher and regenerator, as well as a great poet. To Mr. Buxton Forman, the author of Laon and Cyntha is ‘that Shelley who, in some circumstances, might have been the Saviour of the World.’ It is needless for me to express my opinion of the comparison instituted by these words. It is enough for me to say that the words are Mr. Buxton Forman’s words, and that he represents favourably the learning and sentiment of a body of gentlemen, whose generous fervour appears to me more commendable than their discretion.

When it is possible for such words to be written by an eminent Shelleyan specialist, and to be read with approval by men of high culture, it must surely be admitted that Shelleyan enthusiasm has gone quite far enough; and that it is well for a writer to produce a truthful account of the poet, who is thus offered to universal homage.

I have not discovered the Real Shelley. The poet of these volumes is the same Real Shelley, who appears in his most agreeable aspects in Hogg’s biography, the delightful book that was stopped midway, because its realism offended the Hunts and Field Place. I mean to show that Shelley was judged fairly, though severely, by those of his contemporaries who, whilst recognizing his genius, condemned his principles, conduct, and social theories. In respect to the Real Shelley, I shall merely bring to light what has been hurtfully withdrawn, or hurtfully withheld from view. As for the fictitious Shelley, with which the Real Shelley has been replaced, I mean to demolish it. In destroying it, I shall be animated by a desire to do something before I go away, to counteract the strong stream of literature—a literature of books, pamphlets, magazine-articles, and articles in powerful journals—which for more than a quarter of a century has been educating people to approve or tolerate the pernicious social philosophy, that requires sound-hearted England to abolish marriage and replace it with the Free Contract.

CHAPTER II.

THE SHELLEYS OF SUSSEX.

Medwin’s Blunders—Lady Shelley’s Statement of The Case—The Michelgrove Shelleys—Sir William Shelley, Justice of The Common Pleas—The Castle Goring Shelleys—Their Pedigree at the Heralds’ College—Evidences of the Connexion of the Two Families—John Shelley, ‘Esquire and Lunatic’—Timothy Shelley, the Yankee Apothecary—Bysshe Shelley’s Career—His Runaway Match with Catherine Michell—His Marriage with the Heiress of Penshurst—His Great Wealth—The Poet’s Alleged Pride in his Connexion with the Sidneys—His Gentle, but not Aristocratic, Lineage.

So much has been written in the ways of sycophancy or vaingloriousness about Shelley’s Norman descent and aristocratic quality, it is necessary to glance at some of the facts of his ancestral story.

The poet’s friend, from the time when they were schoolfellows at Brentford, Thomas Medwin the Younger, was also the poet’s kinsman—his third cousin, through Sir Bysshe Shelley’s marriage with Mary Catherine Michell, and his second cousin, through Sir Timothy Shelley’s marriage with Elizabeth Pilford. It might have been supposed that a biographer, thus related to Shelley by blood and friendship, would know the prime facts of his friend’s pedigree, and state them without egregious error. But poor Tom Medwin was not remarkable for accuracy.

To rely in this affair on the whilom littérateur and cavalry officer, is to believe that the poet was a lineal descendant of Sir John Shelley of Maresfield Park, who was created a baronet in 1611; to believe that this Sir John Shelley’s son (William) was a Justice of the Common Pleas; and to believe that the poet’s great-grandfather (Timothy Shelley, of Fen Place, Co. Sussex) was a lineal descendant, in the ninth descent, of the aforesaid baronet of James the First’s time. ‘I will only say,’ Medwin remarks lightly, ‘that Sir John Shelley, of Maresfield Park, who dated his Baronetage from the earliest creation of that title in 1611, had besides other issue, two sons, Sir William, a Judge of the Common Pleas, and Edward; from the latter of whom, in the seventh descent, sprung Timothy, who also had two sons, and settled—having married an American lady—at Christ’s Church, Newark, in North America.’

Medwin is wrong in all the really important allegations of the brief statement. Sir John Shelley of Michelgrove (the baronet referred to) had two sons; but neither of them was named Edward; neither of them became a Justice of the Common Pleas; neither of them was in any way or degree accountable for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s appearance on the earth’s surface. The poet was no more descended from Sir John Shelley, the first of the Michelgrove baronets, than he was descended from the man in the moon. How could the poet’s great-grandfather (Timothy, born in 1700 A.D.) be the eighth in descent from the first Michelgrove baronet, the seventh in descent from either of the baronet’s sons? Human generations do not come and go at the rate of seven to a century.

To pass for a moment from Tom Medwin (of whose egregious mis-statements something more must be said) to the present Lady Shelley, the poet’s daughter-in-law. ‘At the close of the last century,’ says this lady in her Shelley Memorials: from Authentic Sources, ‘the family of the Shelleys had long held a high position among the large landholders of Sussex. Fortunate marriages in two generations preceding the birth of the poet considerably increased the wealth and influence of the house, the head of which was a staunch Whig.’ Lady Shelley’s book from authentic sources contains several statements of no authenticity. For each of the principal statements of the above-quoted words, she had, however, good authority. But instead of coming to her from a single authentic source, the facts embodied in the quotation were drawn from two different authentic sources, the archives of the Michelgrove Shelleys, and the archives of the Castle Goring Shelleys; and by cleverly combining the two sets of facts, Lady Shelley conveys to her readers a very erroneous impression respecting the condition of the poet’s seventeenth-century ancestors. Unquestionably, the Sussex Shelleys, at the close of the eighteenth century, had long held a high position among the large landowners of the county. But these fortunate Shelleys were not the family of which the poet was the brightest ornament. They were the Michelgrove Shelleys; whereas the poet came of people, differing greatly from the Michelgrove people in social quality. He was of the Castle Goring Shelleys—a family that, instead of being merely enriched, was created and established by the fortunate marriages to which Lady Shelley refers. Before the first of those marriages, wedlock had done much for the advantage of these inferior Shelleys. For instance, the marriage, in 1692, of John Shelley, of Fen Place, jure uxoris, with Helen, co-heir of Roger Bysshe, of Fen Place, Co. Sussex, had reclaimed the poet’s direct male ancestors from a state of territorial vagrancy, and given them a permanent, though modest, abiding-place. But for a considerable period after that marriage, the direct ancestral precursors of the Castle Goring Shelleys were no such house as the readers of Lady Shelley’s book are likely to imagine. The Michelgrove Shelleys were one ‘house,’ the Castle Goring Shelleys were quite another house; though it has for some time been the fashion of biographers to mix the two houses, and speak of them by turns as one house, or as branches of the same house. The Michelgrove Shelleys were an ancient house. The Castle Goring Shelleys were a mushroom family, disdainfully regarded by the Michelgrove people, at the opening of the nineteenth century.

Something more must be said of the older of these houses. The Michelgrove Shelleys are said, for reasons no longer discoverable, to have entered the country with the Conqueror. They may have done so. There is better evidence that they had lands in Kent in the times of Edward I. and Edward II., before they established themselves in Sussex; and still better testimony, that one of the clan (John Shelley) was Member of Parliament for Rye from 1415 to 1428. With this parliamentary personage, the house, or rather the family from which the house proceeded, comes into the clear light of history. Two long generations later (generations so lengthy that one has reason to suspect a failure of the record) the house acquired a dignity, which gave it an enduring place amongst the historic families of the realm.

Bred to the law, William Shelley (the grandson, or maybe the great-grandson, of the afore-mentioned Member for Rye) became Reader of the Inner Temple in 1517, and after holding successively the office of a Judge of the Sheriff’s Court and the office of Recorder of the City of London, rose to be a Judge of the Common Pleas somewhere about the beginning of 1527. Before mounting to this eminence he had represented the City in Parliament, and practised for six years as a Serjeant-at-law in Westminster Hall. Those who know Cavendish’s Wolsey do not need to be reminded of the part taken by this fortunate lawyer in the negotiations that closed with the Cardinal’s surrender of York House to Henry the Eighth. ‘Tell his Highness,’ said the fallen Cardinal to the Judge of the Common Pleas, ‘that I am his most faithful subject and obedient beadsman, whose command I will in no wise disobey; but will in all things fulfil his pleasure, as you the father of the law say I may. I therefore charge your conscience to discharge me, and show His Highness from me that I must desire His Majesty to remember there is both heaven and hell;’ a message which the judge probably forgot to deliver, as he lived to entertain the King at Michelgrove, and was continued in his office till Henry’s death. Surviving the sovereign, whom he served on the bench of the Common Pleas for twenty years, Sir William Shelley served Edward the Sixth in the same capacity, to the day of his own death, which occurred between November 3, 1548 (the date of his last fine), and May 10, 1549, the date of his successor’s appointment.

Fortunate in his professional career, Sir William Shelley was no less fortunate in his domestic affairs. Marrying an heiress, he had, with other children, John, the grandfather of the first Michelgrove baronet, and Sir Richard Shelley, the last English Prior of St. John of Jerusalem.

Not much less than a century wrong in assigning the legal eminence of Henry the Eighth’s judge to the eldest son of James the First’s baronet, Medwin wrote under a general impression that the Shelleys to whom he was related, had somehow or other descended from the Michelgrove house, an impression which the poet seems also to have cherished, and imparted to his college-friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who writes in serio-comic vein of Sir Guyon de Shelley and Sir Richard Shelley (the Knight of Malta), as though the Grand Prior of the sixteenth century and the Paladin with the three conchs were veritable forefathers of the Castle Goring Shelleys.

That these Shelleys of the junior house were no family of singular antiquity or overpowering dignity, is shown by the pedigree of Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in the first volume of Mr. Forman’s edition of the poet’s prose works. A pedigree of only nine generations, beginning with mention of Henry Shelley, of Worminghurst, Co. Sussex, who died in 1623, this evidential writing puts it beyond question that the poet, of whose ancestral grandeur so much has been written, was no man of noble or otherwise splendid lineage; puts it beyond question, that whether regard be had to the number of its generations, the antiquity of the earliest dates, or the importance of the persons commemorated in its entries, it is (from the date of Henry Shelley’s death temp. James I. to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s birth in 1792) nothing more than such a pedigree as could be displayed by the majority of the gentle families of the middle way of English life, who never for a moment think of rating themselves as families of patrician worth.

One or two rather awkward matters excepted, this pedigree is a fair and honest record of the births, marriages, and deaths, of nine successive generations of gentle people; but as an exhibition of familiar grandeur, it is no more impressive than any pedigree one would regard as a matter of course in the muniment room of a country gentleman, tracing his descent from a gentle yeoman of the Elizabethan period. It mentions eight of the poet’s forefathers in the direct right line. Describing some of these eight individuals as ‘esquires,’ and some of them as ‘gentlemen,’ the record shows that no one of them bore any hereditary honour, or even the dignity of knighthood before the poet’s birth. It shows that no one of them married a woman of higher quality than the degree of a simple gentlewoman. Doubtless they were (with a single exception) gentlewomen in the heraldic sense of the term,—daughters of gentlemen bearing arms,—but to use an old-world phrase, no one of them was ‘a woman of quality.’ The record shows, that at the time of the poet’s birth, no one of his eight male ancestors in the direct right line had served the State with distinction, won a foremost place in one of the learned professions, or attained to any social eminence higher than a place in a Commission of the Peace.

Such is the evidence of the document of which Mr. Forman justly remarks, ‘the pedigree speaks for itself to any careful reader.’ And this evidence is the more impressive, because the carefully elaborated record is the pedigree deposited at the Heralds’ College on 6th March, 1816, by Mr. John Shelley Sidney (the poet’s uncle by the half-blood), at a moment when he was especially desirous of figuring to the best possible advantage in the esteem of heralds and their employers. Regard being had to this gentleman’s character and social ambition, and his pride in his descent from the Sidneys, it cannot be questioned that he made his genealogical record showy and impressive to the utmost of his ability,—that he would fain have driven it back another generation,—that could he have demonstrated a connection between the Castle Goring and Michelgrove Shelleys, he would not have omitted to prove them two branches of the same tree.

Mr. John Shelley Sidney’s forbearance from pushing the genealogical record a single stage backwards beyond the certain evidences, is the more noteworthy and creditable, because he can scarcely have been ignorant of the inconclusive, though by no means inconsiderable, testimony that the Henry Shelley, who died at Worminghurst in 1623, was the grandson of Edward Shelley of the said parish, and that this Edward Shelley was the younger brother of the Judge of the Common Pleas, who was the actual founder of the Michelgrove family.

What are the inconclusive, though considerable, evidences of this descent of the Castle Goring Shelleys and the Michelgrove Shelleys from a common ancestor, John Shelley, the judge’s father? A manuscript, in the possession of the present Sir Percy Shelley, bears witness that the Henry Shelley, of Worminghurst, mentioned in the first entry of the pedigree (deposited by Mr., afterwards Sir John Shelley Sidney in the Heralds’ College), was the son of Henry Shelley of the same parish. Consequently, if reliance may be placed on this manuscript, the most ancient of the male ancestors in the right line, from whom Mr. John Shelley Sidney traced his descent, was preceded by his father at Worminghurst, a fact carrying the poet’s lineage another generation backwards, into the closing term of the Tudor period. There is, moreover, in the chancel of Worminghurst Church, a brass, of sixteenth century workmanship, to the memory of Edward Shelley, Esq., one of the four masters of the royal household, in the successive reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, and Mary Tudor. There are grounds for believing that this Edward Shelley was a son of John Shelley, of Michelgrove, and younger brother of Sir William Shelley, Justice of the Common Pleas. The archives of the Michelgrove Shelleys certify that Sir William Shelley, the judge of the Common Pleas, had a younger brother named Edward. That the poet’s certain male ancestors in the right line bore the same arms as the Michelgrove Shelleys in the seventeenth century, that vigilant heralds permitted them to bear those arms, and that no baronet of the Michelgrove Shelleys ever questioned their right to bear those arms, are noteworthy pieces of testimony that the two families came from the same source. In the absence of positive evidence of the fact, it cannot be denied that Sir Bernard Burke had sufficient presumptive testimony, to warrant him in recording that the poet was a lineal descendant of Edward Shelley, the judge’s younger brother. There is also fair presumptive testimony that the judge’s younger brother Edward was the Edward Shelley, who held office as one of the Masters of Henry the Eighth’s household, and found his grave in Worminghurst. Such evidence would not be sufficient to establish a claim to a dormant peerage, or to the reversion of a great estate; but it is sufficient for the purpose of Shelley’s personal historian.

‘The house,’ which Lady Shelley regards as having been merely enriched by the fortunate marriages that created it, was a curiously vagrant family for a house ‘holding a high position among the large landholders of Sussex.’ Leaving Worminghurst, Co. Sussex, on the demise of Henry Shelley (‘esq.,’ as he is described in the official pedigree), who died there in 1623, the house moved to Ichingfield, in the time of Richard Shelley (‘gent.,’ as he is modestly defined in the same genealogical chart). Under the government of John Shelley, ‘esq.,’ who died in 1673, the house rested at Thakeham, whence it migrated to Fen Place, in the parish of Worth, Co. Sussex, on the marriage, in 1692, of John Shelley (of Fen Place, jure uxoris, Co. Sussex, esq.), with Hellen, younger of the two daughters and co-heirs of Roger Bysshe, of Fen Place, aforesaid. Of the eight children of this marriage, the reader of the present work is invited to take notice of no more than two, John Shelley, the second, and Timothy Shelley, the third son. Born at Worth in 1696, this last-named John Shelley, who died in 1772 at Uckfield, is handed down to all future time by the pedigree as ‘an esquire and lunatic.’ That there was a strain of insanity in the Castle-Goring Shelleys is a matter to be borne in mind by those who are interested in the poet and his nearest kindred. Percy Bysshe was great-great-nephew of this lunatic, and great-grandson of the lunatic’s brother, Timothy, of whom further mention must be made.

Born at Worth, in April 1700, the third son, and fifth child, of a petty squireen, who lived to have nine children to set going in the world, Timothy, on coming to man’s estate, emigrated to the American plantations, with a slender purse and an abundant store of physical energy. It is probable that he also carried across the Atlantic some knowledge of medicine and surgery, acquired during an apprenticeship to a country apothecary. As there is no evidence that he passed, or tried to pass, an examination at the Apothecaries’ Hall, or Surgeons’ Hall, nor any evidence that the adventurer underwent any medical training before he crossed the Atlantic, Medwin may have been right in believing that he fought life’s battle in the New World as ‘a quack doctor.’ It should, however, be borne in mind that, if he had served an apprenticeship to a Sussex apothecary, this Timothy would have possessed all the legal qualification to kill and cure, that was required of provincial apothecaries in the mother country prior to the Medical Act of 1814. Anyhow, with or without qualification, the adventurer established himself as a medicine man, and with quackery, or without it, throve in his adopted calling. Practising at Christ’s Church, Newark, he married a widow with money. In this last particular he held firmly to the main article of Shelleyan worldly wisdom. The poet’s ancestors may have married for love, but they usually required a substantial compensation for the loss of celibatic freedom. The widow to whom Timothy surrendered himself was the widow of a New York miller, named Plum; and it is believed that her purse satisfied the hopes planted in her admirer’s breast by so suggestive a name. Marrying thus prudently, Timothy Shelley, of Newark, became the father of his first-born son, John Shelley, on the 10th of December, 1729, and of his second son, Bysshe Shelley (the first of the Castle Goring baronets), on the 21st of June, 1731.

It is doubtful when Timothy of Newark returned to England, where his father died in 1739, after surviving his eldest and issueless son by some six years. He may have sailed ‘for home,’ on news coming to him in Newark of his father’s death. That he became the actual chief of the family on his father’s demise may be inferred from the fact that he is styled in the pedigree his father’s ‘heir.’ After setting his English affairs in order, he may have returned to America for awhile. It is more probable, however, that, returning to England with his two boys, when the elder of them was some ten, and the younger some eight years old, he was content to play the part of a modest Sussex squireen to the day of his death. Anyhow it is certain the equally adventurous and fortunate apothecary (or ‘quack doctor,’ if any reader prefers Tom Medwin’s word) was the squire of Fen Place for a considerable term of years, before he was coffined, and put under the floor of Warnham Church, in 1770, some two years and six months before the death of his elder and lunatic brother.

What became of this fortunate apothecary’s two sons, John (the elder) and Bysshe (the younger)? Becoming the head of ‘the House’ on his father’s demise in 1770, the apothecary’s elder son married the daughter of a Sussex gentleman, led a comparatively uneventful life at Field Place, near Horsham, and dying childless in 1790, was buried in Warnham Church; being succeeded by his younger brother, a man far superior to him in address and energy, if not in benevolence and piety. Planted by the petty squireen, who took possession of Roger Bysshe’s daughter and home, and watered by the apothecary who had followed fortune, and found money in America, the family that gave England her brightest, and sweetest, and most passionate lyric poet, was raised to the dignity of a house, by the craft, greed, and penuriousness of Bysshe Shelley, the first baronet of Castle Goring.

The several excellent writers, who have been misled on the matter by Medwin, the Misleader, may take the present writer’s assurance that the gentleman, who won a baronetcy in his old age, never ‘exercised the profession of a quack doctor’ in America. There is, however, sufficient evidence that the Newark apothecary’s younger son was designed to follow his father’s calling. In his sordid and eccentric old age, when the lord of Castle Goring inhabited a small house hard by his favourite tap-room in Horsham, it was generally believed that he had at one time practised medicine in London. It may also be put upon the present record, that he was believed to have been a partner in the professional activities of Dr. James Graham, the notorious mesmeric charlatan, in whose Temple of Health the fair and frail Emma Harte officiated as the Goddess Hygeia, before she became Sir William Hamilton’s wife and Nelson’s mistress. Percy Bysshe, the poet, told Hogg, that his grandfather supplied the money which enabled Graham to set up his preposterous purple chariot. Percy’s statements, however, should be regarded suspiciously, when they tend to the discredit of his sire and grandsire.

Whatever the means he used for making money, it is certain that the man, who in his old age was remarkable for the stateliness of his presence, and in his milder moods for the courtesy of manner, possessed in his youth no ordinary charms of appearance and address. Tall, even as his famous grandson, and qualified by his blue eyes and brown curls to captivate heedless womankind, he had not crossed the threshold of manly estate, when he found favour in the eyes of Miss Mary Catherine Michell, only child and heir of the late Reverend Theobald Michell, clk., formerly of Horsham. The young lady (only eighteen years old) having considerable possessions, it is probable that her guardians thought she could do better for herself than marry the boyish medical student, who was only the younger son of the squire and whilom apothecary of Fen Place. Possibly they only expressed a strong opinion, that the young man should wait awhile, and thereby avoid the evils of precipitate wedlock. Possibly they had no opportunity of expressing an opinion on the matter, until remonstrance would have been out of time. To the young people it appeared a case for elopement and irregular marriage; and, acting on this romantic view of their position, they hastened to town and were married in 1752, at Keith’s Chapel, Mayfair (the fashionable place for Fleet marriages done in the west end of the town). From Keith’s Chapel they hastened to Paris, where the bride fell ill of small-pox, and narrowly escaped the death that would have made Tom Medwin’s mother the heir of the late Rev. Theobald Michell’s estate. Eight years later, the lady died after giving birth to three children, and Mr. Bysshe Shelley was at liberty to look out for a second heiress willing to become his wife. The only son of this marriage was Timothy Shelley, the poet’s father, who became M.P. for New Shoreham, Co. Sussex.

Nine years after his first wife’s death, Mr. Bysshe Shelley fixed his affections on another heiress—the heiress of an historic line and an historic estate—Miss Elizabeth Jane Sidney Perry, only daughter and heir of William Perry, Esq., of Turvill Park, Bucks, Wormington, Co. Gloucester, and Penshurst Place, Co. Kent. It is remarkable that an heiress of so bright a lineage and so noble an estate—an heiress who, in descent and fortune, was a fit match for an earl—an heiress lineally descended from the Sidneys, Earls of Leicester—should have lived in singleness to her twenty-ninth year. Perhaps this remarkable fact gave the younger son of the Newark apothecary the requisite courage for a daring exploit.

Thirty-eight years old, he was no longer young when he first conceived the purpose of winning so notable an heiress. But though well on in middle age, he had the figure, and face, and audacity, of a youngster. Taking up a position, suitable for his purpose, in a little inn near the Park, celebrated by Jonson’s verse, and glorified by the loves of Waller and Saccharissa, he crossed the lady’s path in her walks, regarded her worshipfully when she attended the services of Penshurst Church, knelt to her beneath the spreading branches of ‘the Lady’s Oak.’ Is it marvellous that a suitor, so eager and vigilant, so comely and daring, achieved his purpose, notwithstanding the disadvantages of inferior station and growing years? Is it wonderful that the gentlewoman eloped with the suitor, who valued her far more for her broad acres than her descent from the Sidneys? Whatever the motives to the suit, Mr. Bysshe Shelley won, in gallant fashion, the lady by whom he had his second lot of children,—five sons and two daughters.

In the year following this marriage, the Newark apothecary was entombed in Warnham Church; and eleven years later (May 1781) Mr. Bysshe Shelley again found himself a widower when he was still in his fiftieth year. Henceforth he devoted himself chiefly to the pursuit of money,—a pursuit in which he was favoured by the death of his childless brother in 1790, when he succeeded to the Fen Place and Field Place estates.

The family having come to his hands, he made ‘a House’ of it. In 1806,—when his little grandson, the future poet, was on the point of going to Eton,—Mr. Bysshe Shelley became Sir Bysshe Shelley, baronet, of Castle Goring; the dignity being the price, with which the Duke of Norfolk rewarded him for former electioneering service, and prepaid him for similar service to be rendered to the Howards and the Whig party to the end of his days. At the date of this social promotion, Sir Bysshe Shelley had already begun to build the egregious Castle which he never finished, though he is said, by the unreliable Medwin, to have spent 80,000l. upon it.

If he ever hoped for happiness in his later time, the hope was disappointed. After he had married his daughters, and sent his sons into life, the passion for money, which had long overpowered the other forces of his nature, developed even to miserly madness. In other respects the strain of insanity, that had given him a lunatic for an uncle, displayed itself in his manifold eccentricities. Living at Horsham, in a little house, and finding his most congenial associates in the tap-rooms of the Horsham taverns, whilst his grandson went to school at Brentford and Eton, the founder of the Castle Goring Shelleys disliked his son so cordially, that he is said to have seldom greeted him without an outbreak of passionate malevolence. Percy, the future poet, used to entertain his comrades at Eton by cursing his absent sire; and at Oxford, he assured Hogg, that he had acquired this singular taste for cursing his father behind his back, from hearing old Sir Bysshe curse him to his face. It was thus that this chief of the Castle Goring Shelleys lived from the creation of his baronetcy in 1806 to his death in 1815, when he left vast wealth in money and lands, In Trust, for the creation of the big entailed estate, that should perpetuate the grandeur of ‘the House’ he had laboured so resolutely to found. Medwin (no safe authority on details) says the old man left to his descendants 300,000l. in the English funds, and landed estates yielding a yearly revenue of 20,000l., besides the banknotes to the amount of 10,000l. that were hidden in the books and other furniture of the room, where he drew and yielded his last breath.

Another thing to be noticed in the evidences of this family is the testimony to the newness of its grandeur, that may be gathered from the records of its territorial possessions. Fen Place came to these Shelleys, through the wedding-ring, so recently as the last decade of the seventeenth century. They acquired Field Place by purchase in the earlier half of the following (the eighteenth) century. For their place ‘among the large landholders of Sussex,’ they are mainly indebted to the Newark apothecary’s younger son, who flourished in George the Third’s time, and died only a few months before the battle of Waterloo.

To take a true view of the poet’s lineage and ancestral quality, the reader must bear in mind the distinctness of the Michelgrove Shelleys and the Castle Goring Shelleys,—a distinctness that would not be affected by the production of positive and indisputable evidence, that the two families had for their common progenitor, a gentle yeoman of Henry the Eighth’s time. Should this remote connexion of the two families ever be put beyond question, it would be none the less true that, instead of being of aristocratic descent, as so many biographers have asserted, the poet came of a line of forefathers who were nothing more than ‘gentle yeomen’ till the later time of George III. The poet was no lineal descendant of the Justice of the Common Pleas, who may be fairly styled the founder of the Michelgrove House. From the date of that slightly historic personage, the Michelgrove family was a knightly house. Baronets from the creation of the order, they intermarried with knightly and noble houses before and after 1611, drawing to their veins the blood of the Belknaps, FitzWilliamses, Sackvilles, Lovells, Reresbys, Vantelets, and Nevills. On the other hand, from the earliest date of his genealogical record, the poet’s ancestors were mere gentle yeomen, intermarrying with families of no higher gentility, till the poet’s grandfather carried off the heiress of the Penshurst Sidneys.

As no drop of Sidney blood came to his veins from his grandfather’s second marriage, and as his kindred of the half-blood at Penshurst were not over-fond of their half-cousins at Field Place, it is scarcely conceivable the poet was so proud of his connexion with the Sidneys as Medwin represents. It may, however, have been so. For with all his vaunted superiority to aristocratic prejudice, and all his sincere hostility to aristocratic privilege, Shelley was by no means exempt from the weakness, which disposed Byron in his vainer moods to think too much of his nobility. The advocate of republican ideas, the apostle of freedom and equality, he was sometimes curiously careful to remind his admirers that he was no demagogue of vulgar origin, but resembled the Lionel of Rosalind and Helen, in being the heir to ‘great wealth and lineage high.’ When this humour prevailed within him, it is possible that he sometimes looked away from the father whom he hated, the grandsire he despised, the obscure yeomen whom he distasted, and could persuade himself that, like his half-cousins at Penshurst, he, too, had somehow or other descended from the Sidneys. But no such innocent exercise of fancy would touch the facts or qualify the complexion of his genealogy. It is nothing to the poet’s dishonour to say that, though better born than Shakespeare, he was no more fortunate in his ancestral story than the majority—or, at least, a large minority of English gentlemen, moving in the middle ways of gentle life.

CHAPTER III.

SHELLEY’S CHILDHOOD.

The Poet’s Father—Shelley’s Birth and Birth-Chamber—Miss Hellen Shelley’s Recollections—The Child-Shelley’s Pleasant Fiction—His Aspect at Tender Age—His Description of his own Nose—The Indian-Ink Sketch—Miss Curran’s ‘Daub’—Williams’s Water-Colour Drawing—Clint’s Composition—Engravings of ‘The Daub’ and ‘The Composition’—The Poet’s Likeness in Marble—Shelley and Byron—Peacock and Hogg on Shelley’s Facial Beauty—The Colnaghi Engraving.

Whatever the failings of the Newark apothecary’s younger son, it must be recorded to his credit that he gave his son an education befitting the chief of a territorial family. Inferior though he was in tact and politeness to the great Chesterfield, whose precepts and example are said to have been largely accountable for his manners and morality, Mr. Timothy Shelley (Sir Bysshe’s son and heir by Mary Catherine Michell) received the training, and, notwithstanding the eccentricities that provoked the smiles of London drawing-rooms, had the port and temper of an English gentleman.

It has been the fashion of biographers to decry this gentleman. Readers, however, should decline to accept the poet’s estimate of the second baronet of Castle Goring, though the much-maligned gentleman wrote comically ungrammatical letters, thought too highly of himself, talked boastfully over his second bottle, swore well up to the mark of Georgian good breeding, and believed himself the originator of every strenuous argument in Paley’s Evidences. The good landlord and kindly patron of aged servants, the squire whose virtues blossomed in the dust, the amiable father whose parental excellences were gratefully remembered by all his surviving children, was neither the fool nor the barbarian his eldest son thought him.

The Shelleyan enthusiasts have little charity for the poet’s sire, even the most discreet of them regarding him as a deplorably inconvenient father for so marvellous a son. It is not clear what kind of father would have won Percy’s filial loyalty. In fairness to this sire, it should be remembered that, if he was not the right kind of father for the poet, he proved an excellent father to all his other children; and that, if the poet should have had a more congenial father, Squire Timothy could not well have had a more trying son than the boy of latent genius, who lived to cover his house with glory.

After keeping his terms at the same Oxford College, from which his son was expelled in the following century, Mr. Timothy Shelley made ‘the grand tour,’ returning in due course with a smattering of French, an extremely bad picture of the Eruption of Vesuvius, and ‘a certain air’ (if Medwin may be trusted) of having seen the world. Having surveyed mankind in European capitals, and entered middle age, he married Miss Elizabeth Pilfold, a gentlewoman of good family and great beauty, who is lightly regarded by the Shelleyan enthusiasts, because, in the conflict of her husband and her son, she held loyally to the former, and declined to be the partisan of the latter. It has even been urged to this lady’s discredit that, when her wilful boy would fain have shaken his sister’s confidence in the doctrines of the Church of England, she, in her mental narrowness, was alarmed for the spiritual safety of her girls, and thought it well that at least for a time they should be guarded from his influence.

Had these parents foreseen the trouble that would come to them from their first-born child, they would have welcomed him coldly on his arrival in the room (at Field Place), one of whose walls has in recent time been illustrated with this inscription:—

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
WAS BORN IN THIS CHAMBER
AUGUST 4TH, 1792.
SHRINE OF THE DAWNING SPEECH AND THOUGHT
OF SHELLEY SACRED BE
TO ALL WHO BOW WHERE TIME HAS BROUGHT
GIFTS TO ETERNITY.

Of Shelley, the little fellow of Dr. Greenlaw’s school at Brentford, we know much from Tom Medwin’s occasionally accurate pages, and from other sources of information, which enable us to check the statements of that more entertaining than reliable biographer. Respecting Shelley at Eton, there is almost a redundance of evidence. Of the Etonian’s ways of amusing himself at Field Place during his holidays, there is no lack of information;—thanks to Miss Hellen Shelley’s goodness in committing all she could remember of her brother to paper, for the assistance of his biographer and fellow-collegian, Hogg, the cynical humourist and clever lawyer. But of Shelley, the nursling of the Field Place nursery, and child of the Field Place schoolroom, few facts are on the record;—scarcely anything besides the three or four matters, which Miss Hellen placed amongst her personal recollections, as matters of domestic tradition, coming to her from times before she was of an age to take clear and enduring cognizance of her brother’s doings.

Seven years his junior, the lady, plying her pen in 1856 (four-and-thirty years after his death), can scarcely have retained any clear memories of him, from a time previous to the opening of her ninth year. Barely seven years old, when her brother went for the first time to Eton, she had in 1856 a memory of uncommon retentiveness, if it afforded her a clear picture of him, as he appeared during the first of his Eton holidays. Fortunately, however, she touches on affairs and incidents of an earlier date; such, for instance, as his visits to the Warnham Vicar, who taught him the rudiments of Latin, visits that began when he was only six years old, and she was still unborn. To this gentle and delightful chronicler, speaking for the moment from memory of her mother’s gossip, we are indebted for our knowledge of the astonishment little Bysshe (whilst a Latin scholar at the Vicar’s school) caused the elders of Field Place, by repeating aloud, word for word, and without an error, Gray’s lines on the Cat and the Gold Fish, after a single reading of the composition.

Without precisely declaring herself indebted to hearsay for the story, Miss Hellen seems to be speaking of a matter anterior to the earliest of her personal observations, when she gives us the particulars of the marvellous ‘invention’ with which Percy in his tender childhood entertained and perplexed the people of his home. The essay in romantic fiction was this: Assuring his sisters (Hellen’s elder sisters) that he had just returned from paying a visit to certain ladies of their village, he recounted to them, minutely, how the ladies received him, how they occupied themselves during his visit, and more particularly how he and they wandered through a delightful garden, well known to the boy’s auditors for its filbert bank and undulating turf bank. On inquiry, it was found that the imaginative urchin had not been to the ladies, their house, or their garden. The whole statement was made up of fibs; ‘but’ (says the recorder of the characteristic incident) ‘it was not considered as a falsehood to be punished.’ Perhaps it would have been better in the long run for little Bysshe, had a less lenient view been taken of the affair that, if not the first, was one of the earliest of those countless deviations from strict historical veracity, which have occasioned so much controversy between his extravagant idolaters and his temperate admirers.

Of the droll things written of the poet by his enthusiastic worshipers, few are droller than the pages in which this exercise of childish fancy is dealt with, as an early exhibition of the peculiar genius that placed him eventually in the highest rank of imaginative artists. Had they not been too engrossed with the affairs of their own home to take nice cognizance of their neighbours’ children, the elders of Field Place, whilst rightly regarding the fib as no flagrant offence, would not have ‘mentioned it as a singular fact.’ To those who are familiar with the ways and humours of children, it is needless to say, that little Bysshe’s ‘invention’ is an example of the commonest kind of the harmless fibs, that come from the proverbially truthful mouths of babes and sucklings. Poets would be unendurably abundant, if all the little boys and girls, who ‘romance’ in this innocent fashion, were destined for the service of the Muses.

In Shelley’s case, however, the story has an exceptional interest, because he never survived the disposition, which thus early in his career caused him to proclaim himself the recipient of civilities that had not been offered to him,—the graceful actor in a domestic drama that had not been performed. All through life, Shelley had a practice of uttering for the truth statements that were not true. All through life, his familiar friends received his communications, with reference to this propensity. Out of their affection for the man, they palliated the weakness with more or less sincere excuses, that relieved the infirmity of the odium of deceitfulness. Some of his friends called attention to the poetical verity, underlying the least veracious statements; others persuaded themselves that the speaker of untruths was the victim of an inordinately powerful imagination. Others, unable to shut their eyes to the sure indications that he was not altogether unaware of the fictitious nature of his statements, maintained that the fables were due partly to hallucination, and only in some degree to wilful inventiveness. Whilst Hogg talked of the poetic verity of the egregious fictions, and of their utterer’s inordinately powerful imagination, Peacock originated the theory of ‘semi-delusion.’

From the few glimpses to be had of him in Miss Hellen Shelley’s letters, and Medwin’s reminiscences, and from bits of testimony which, though found in records of his later boyhood, are evidential to certain particulars of his earlier infancy, the cautious historian can produce the principal characteristics of the little fellow, who used to play with his sisters in the Field Place gardens, and ride on his pony about the Warnham lanes, in years anterior to his first departure from home for boarding-school. It is manifest that the child, who from his seventh to his eleventh year went daily to the Warnham Vicar for instruction in Latin, and received his other lessons in his sisters’ schoolroom, may be thought of as a shy, nervous, timid, small-headed urchin; tall for his years, but delicately fashioned. Narrow-chested and slightly round-shouldered, he had the look of a little fellow, scarcely strong enough to enjoy the sports of robust children. A slight slip of a lad, more given to loitering than running about the Field Place gardens; more often seen sitting by the fire, than dancing on the carpet of his sisters’ play-room; he was gentle in his happier moods with a girlish gentleness, and sometimes fretful with a girlish fretfulness. Deficient in boyishness, the boy had a face, chiefly remarkable for the fawn-like prominence of its deep blue eyes, the delicate, though imperfect, shapeliness of its mouth, the rather comical meanness of its little tip-tilted nose, and the red-and-white of its singularly bright complexion; the general girlishness of his appearance being heightened by the profusion of the silky hair, falling and flowing in blond-brown ringlets about his long neck and weedy shoulders.

Years later, musing on his conception of his former self, when he preferred the society of his little sister to the company of the rough boys of the Vicar’s schoolroom, Shelley wrote in Rosalind and Helen, of Helen’s docile child:—

‘He was a gentle boy,
And in all gentle sports took joy;
Oft in a dry leaf for a boat,
With a small feather for a sail,
His fancy on that spring would float,
If some invisible breeze would stir
Its marble calm.’

In like manner, ‘Abdallah’ and ‘Maimuna’ (the little Bysshe and Bessie of The Assassins) used to float their toy-boats upon the water of their smiling creek. Shelley’s delight in toy-flotillas may have arisen for the first time (as some of his biographers aver) long after his childhood. Possibly he was the fool of his own fancy in thinking he cared to play with toy-boats in his infancy. It is, however, certain, that gentleness characterized the child, who, on attaining manhood, meditated complacently on the delight he took in gentle sports when he was a gentle boy.

From what has been said of the facial show of the little fellow, who used to play in the Field Place gardens, and ride his Shetland pony about the Warnham lanes, in the closing years of the last, and the opening summers of the present century, it follows that the picture published by Mr. Colnaghi, in 1879, as a veritable portraiture of Shelley in his childhood, is an unauthentic and delusive performance. An exquisite example of childish beauty, the little boy of Mr. Colnaghi’s engraving has a straight, finely-pointed nose, and a face of faultless symmetry; a nose that could not have developed into the distinctly tip-tilted nose of the poet’s later visage; a face, that could not have departed so far from its normal mould, as in later time to bear any resemblance to the poet’s countenance, which is represented by all the several persons of his familiar acquaintance, who wrote about it, as having been no less wanting in symmetry than fortunate in the charms of expressiveness. Whilst declaring the singular comeliness of the poet’s face in its happier moments, Hogg records that its ‘features were not symmetrical.’ Medwin, ever quick to glorify his cousin, admits that his features were ‘not regularly handsome.’ Though she busied herself to impose upon the world the picture of a beautifully symmetrical face as Shelley’s veritable semblance, and was even more accountable than Mrs. Shelley for the prevailing misconceptions respecting his facial aspect, Mrs. Hogg (the Mrs. Williams of Shelleyan annals) admitted to Mr. Rossetti, in Trelawny’s presence, on March 13, 1872, that the poet ‘could not be called handsome or beautiful, though the character of his face was so remarkable for ideality and expression;’ the lady, at the same time, confirming what Hogg and Peacock tell us of the unmusical character of the poet’s voice. In the opinion of the lady, whose singing was unutterably sweet to her spiritual worshiper, Shelley’s ‘voice was decidedly disagreeable.’ On seeing the familiar pictures of Shelley, that serve as the frontispieces in Hogg’s Life, and Trelawny’s Recollections, Peacock declined to regard them as likenesses of his former friend; putting them aside not merely as ineffective and unsatisfactory likenesses, but as no likenesses whatever of the individual they professed to represent. ‘The portraits,’ he remarked in Fraser, ‘do not impress themselves on me as likenesses; they seem to me to want the true outline of Shelley’s features, above all, to want their true expression.’ How could he honestly speak otherwise of the spurious and delusive portraits, ‘in which’ (to repeat his own words) ‘the nose has no turn-up?’ That Shelley had a small and distinctly tip-tilted nose, instead of the straight and rather large (though delicately moulded) nose of the lying pictures, appears from words penned by himself to Peacock, from Leghorn, in August, 1819. After speaking derisively of John Gisborne’s quite Slawkenbergian nose as a thing that, weighing upon the beholder’s imagination, and transforming all its owner’s g’s into k’s, was a feature scarcely to be forgiven by Christian charity, Shelley observed, ‘I, you know, have a little turn-up nose; Hogg has a large hook one; but add them together, square them, cube them, you would have but a faint notion of the nose to which I refer.’ Shelley having written in this way of the defective shape and size of a principal feature of his face, it is not surprising that, whilst avoiding such words as ‘unsymmetrical’ and ‘irregular,’ Lady Shelley admitted reluctantly in her Shelley Memorials, that the poet’s ‘features were not positively handsome.’ The wonder is that, after making this admission in the text, the lady told a different story in the frontispiece of her book. The evidence is superabundant that, instead of being positively handsome, Shelley’s little nose was positively tip-tilted, and his face positively unsymmetrical.

To see the real Shelley, as he appeared during life to persons who regarded him through no such disturbing medium as romantic glamour, it is needful to get the better of misconceptions, arising from the delusive portraitures of him, to be found in familiar biographies—the fanciful pictures, which are the more intolerable for being fruitful of misapprehensions respecting the poet’s moral endowments.

The epithet applied to the delusive portraitures, was chosen with deliberation. ‘Fanciful’ in effect, they had their origin in fancy, and may be fairly described as the offspring of fancy working upon fancy, at different times and under various conditions. Shelley never sate to a professional painter. From the year that produced the Indian-ink sketch of a young gentleman, wearing the scant gown and leading bands of an Oxford undergraduate, to the year of his death, Shelley never gave a competent painter an opportunity for producing a work, that would have prevented the fanciful misrepresentations from gaining any credit—possibly would even have prevented them from coming into existence.

It would have been better for his readers, and certainly no worse for his fame, had he never consented to sit to an amateur. But it was fated that the man, who suffered so much in more important matters from sterner adversaries, should suffer considerably from two dabblers in the fine arts. At Rome (Lady Shelley says in 1818, Trelawny says in 1819) Miss Curran began the portrait in oil, which she never finished, of the poet in his twenty-eighth year—the sketch which, dropped and relinquished by the fair limner, possibly because she felt she had made ‘a bad beginning,’ was destined to be the chief source of all the artistic falsities, that have been manufactured to his injury since his death. Trelawny says this failure was ‘left in an altogether flat and inanimate state’—a description to be kept in mind.

An amateur in oil (of the gentler sex) having thus attempted and failed to paint the poet when he was at Rome, two or three years later (1821 or 1822) Shelley surrendered himself to a masculine dabbler in water-colours—to Williams, the companion of his voyage to death. Possibly, this sketch (which differed from Miss Curran’s effort, in being finished) would have been preserved, had it accorded with the spurious portraitures, given so profusely in later time to a credulous and undiscerning public. But it has disappeared; and at the present date no one can say how far it merited the praise given to it by Trelawny, whose favourable opinion of the ‘spirited water-colour drawing’ would deserve more consideration, had he known half as much about the fine arts as he knew about horses and yachts. The Indian-ink sketch of a boy in the academicals of an Oxford undergraduate, the unfinished daub in oil, and the ‘spirited water-colour drawing,’ are the only portraits of the poet, known to have been produced by artists of any qualification or incapacity during his life.

Possibly, the Indian-ink sketch, which De Quincey saw somewhere in London, was the best of the three performances. It cannot have been much more absurd than Miss Curran’s absurdity, though from De Quincey’s words it seems to have been a sufficiently ludicrous production. ‘The sketch,’ says the Opium-Eater, ‘tallied pretty well with a verbal description which I had heard of him in some company, viz.: that he was tall, slender, and presenting the air of an elegant flower, whose head drooped from being surcharged with rain’—a description censured by the essayist for giving the equally false and disagreeable impression that the youthful littérateur ‘was tainted, even in his external deportment, by some excess of sickly sentimentalism, from which, however, in all stages of his life, he was remarkably free.’ Though, possibly, more like the man than Miss Curran’s fanciful oil-daub and Mr. Williams’s ‘spirited’ achievement in water-colour, this performance in Indian-ink, which made a young Englishman look like a dripping lily or a rose well wetted at a pump, was certainly a libel on the scandalous undergraduate.

Perhaps it would have been well had the spirited water-colour disappeared sooner. It would have been better than well had Miss Curran’s ‘failure’ been tossed into the Tiber as soon as she despaired of making a decent picture of it. Unfortunately, the thing that was only begun by a woman, and the thing that was finished to the last touch by man, survived the poet; so that Mrs. Shelley (through Mrs. Williams) was able to put them into the hands of Mr. Clint, with a request that out of such sorry materials, her own reminiscences—the recollections of a widow who liked to speak of herself as ‘the chosen mate of a celestial spirit’—and his sense of the fitness of things, he would compose a picture, worthy of being handed down to posterity, as the veritable and unquestionably historic likeness of the greatest lyrical poet of the nineteenth century.

The fancy picture, that was ‘composed’ under these less unusual than laughable circumstances, may not be more untruthful, but certainly is not more veracious, than the majority of fancy portraits. ‘Of these materials,’ Trelawny wrote in 1858, ‘Mrs. Williams, on her return to England after the death of Shelley, got Clint to compose a portrait, which the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life thought very like him. The water-colour drawing has been lost, so that the portrait done by Clint is the only one of any value.’ What evidential value can attach to a portrait ‘composed’ and ‘done’ under such circumstances? Apart from his weakness (one might, perhaps, say his dishonesty) in consenting to the prayer of the poet’s widow and her friend (Mrs. Williams), no blame belongs to Clint. Doing as portrait-painters are wont to do, when they agree to manufacture posthumous likenesses of people they have never seen, Clint worked up a fancy picture out of the two performances by amateurs; assuming that he might rely on those performances for correct information as to the principal features and general effect of the poet’s countenance. On points where the two performances gave incongruent evidence, he relied on the widows (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) to instruct him as to which of the two performances was the more trustworthy. The portrait having been ‘composed’ and ‘done’ in this way, the final touches were added in accordance with further information from Mrs. Williams and further suggestions by ‘the chosen mate of a celestial spirit.’

The falseness and absurdity of the composition are mainly referable to the romantic view Miss Curran took of the poet’s appearance, and to her romantic desire to give him the beauty which she deemed appropriate to the author of incomparably beautiful poems. Rating him with the angels, the lady was determined he should look like an angel—on her canvas. Beginning with this ambition, it is no matter for surprise that she made only ‘a beginning.’ If he was instructed to rely on the daub in oil, rather than on the spirited water-colour, it is not wonderful Clint went wrong. In her resolve to make Shelley look like an angel, Miss Curran decided to make the principal feature of his portrait altogether unlike the most prominent feature of his face. In the face, this feature wanted the size and contour needful for the romantic beauty, with which the lady would fain have endowed her bard. In the picture, this particular feature has every quality required in a feature of its kind by connoisseurs of romantic beauty—connoisseurs, that is to say, of the conventional school to which the lady and her friends (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) belonged.

The artist was not more interested than either of the other ladies in misrepresenting the poet in this particular feature. Mrs. Williams was animated with sentimental tenderness for the poet, who wrote her so much beautiful poetry. It was natural for this romantic mourner to wish that in his historic portrait, her Platonic lover should be relieved of a facial defect, that in her opinion amounted to disfigurement. Whilst mourning sincerely for her husband, Mrs. Williams mourned romantically for the poet who had perished with her husband in the same wild storm. In like manner, Mrs. Shelley (whose notions of the beautiful were purely conventional) was desirous that this particular feature should be dealt with tenderly, delicately, lovingly, in the portrait that would represent her husband’s facial show to future ages. Hence it was, that whilst he was composing the great historic portrait chiefly out of Miss Curran’s artistic falsehood, neither of the ladies, on whose guidance he relied, was in a mood to tell Mr. Clint in what respect the oil-daub was especially misleading, or even to hint it was likely to mislead him in any way. Sixty years since, a little turn-up nose was universally regarded as a nose wholly unbefitting a poet. In their measures for rendering their poet altogether admirable and lovely to unborn ages, both ladies were especially desirous that on the historic canvas he should be endowed with a nose wholly unlike the one that had been, in their eyes, the great blemish of his earthly tabernacle.

If Trelawny’s evidence may be accepted, Clint did his work to the satisfaction of ‘the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life.’ As Trelawny was one of those few, the ‘composition’ may be assumed to have had his approval. But Trelawny knew nothing of pictures, and little of the poet with whose story he will be associated to the end of time. The whole term of their friendly intercourse exceeded six months by no more than two or three days. And throughout that term the Cornish gentleman, with his simple reverence for literature and men of letters, regarded the poet through the glamour that makes things seem other than they are. On being shown the portrait for the first time, with an assurance that people approved it, Trelawny was not the man to discover anything wrong in it. When he saw it for the first time, a considerable number of long years had elapsed since the death of his acquaintance for six short months. Under these circumstances, Trelawny’s good word goes for nothing in the estimate of the spurious performance. That Hogg resembled Peacock in rating the picture at its proper worthlessness is matter of certainty; for though an engraving of the artistic imposture faces the title-page of his first volume, the biographer shows himself fully alive to the fictitious nature of the composition, by his vivid and minute verbal portraitures of the poet at Oxford and in later stages of his career.

Since Trelawny published Vinter’s lithograph of the picture as a frontispiece to the Recollections (1858), numerous engravings have appeared on wood, stone, or metal, of the posthumous ‘composition’ which the Cornish gentleman, at the time of his book’s appearance, regarded as the only reliable painting of the poet. ‘The water-colour drawing has been lost,’ Trelawny wrote in 1858, ‘so the portrait done by Clint is the only one of any value.’ At that time he was far from imagining that the oil-sketch, which Miss Curran ‘never finished, and left in an altogether flat and inanimate state,’ would ever compete in public confidence with the posthumous ‘composition.’ To the present writer it has not seemed worth the while to inquire what (if anything) was done to Miss Curran’s ‘failure,’ to bring it out of the ‘altogether flat and inanimate state,’ and put it into a condition to be regarded (on the authority of words spoken by Sir Percy Shelley, on the authority of his mother) as the ‘best portrait extant’ of the poet. It is enough for the present writer and his readers to know that Miss Curran’s beginning of a portrait has risen to this place in Sir Percy’s esteem—to know that it rose eventually to an equally high place in Mary Godwin Shelley’s esteem—to know from Lady Shelley’s assurance that the frontispiece of the third edition of her Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources, is an engraving from (to use her ladyship’s words) ‘the original picture by Miss Curran, painted at Rome in 1818, now in Sir Percy Shelley’s possession’—to know, from Mr. Buxton Forman’s authoritative assurance, that the frontispiece to the first volume of his edition of The Poetical Works is an engraving from the same ‘best portrait extant,’ and not an engraving of Clint’s posthumous ‘composition’—to know that engravings from this ‘best portrait extant’ have, like the engravings at first hand of the ‘composition,’ been repeatedly re-engraved (with or without variations to suit the requirements of editorial taste),—and, lastly, to know that all the engravings and re-engravings of the two delusive originals are flagrant and altogether-to-be-repudiated misrepresentations of the poet’s actual appearance.

After what has been said of Miss Curran’s unfinished oil-sketch, and Clint’s posthumous ‘composition,’ which was mainly made up from the lady’s derelict absurdity, it is needless to say that all the engravings and re-engravings of the abandoned fib and the elaborate falsehood bear a close resemblance to one another. Resembling one another in the contour of the features, the arrangement of the hair (even to the tips of the curls), the items of costume (even to the shape of the rumpled Byronic collars), these engravings and re-engravings might be mistaken for reproductions of the same original picture—allowance being made for the taste and whims of engravers, the fancies and requirements of editors. The only difference between the avowed engravings from Miss Curran’s daub and the engravings of Mr. Clint’s composition is that the former are something more unnatural and unsatisfactory than the latter. The poet of the former lot of engravings is a somnambulant girl—a sleepwalker from dyspepsia, who, on leaving her bed somehow or other, contrived to put on her brother’s walking-coat instead of her own bodice. The poet of the latter set of engravings is a very pretty girl, exhibiting no sign of disease, apart from the indications of a desire to look something wiser and prettier than she really is. Like the somnambulant girl of the more disagreeable picture, the young lady of these less disagreeable engravings has put on her brother’s coat, wears Byronic shirt-collars, has a quill pen in her lily-white hand, and is so posed that her right fore-arm is resting on an open manuscript. Of the dozen or more engravings of this young lady now lying open before the present writer’s desk, the one to which he would direct his readers’ attention—in consideration of its being the most agreeable, typical, and artistic of them all—is the engraving by that fine engraver, Francis Holl, which does duty as frontispiece to the first volume of Hogg’s (unfinished) Life.

What is offered to the eye by this frontispiece? It is the picture of a man, to judge of it from the coat, the folds of the Byronic shirt-collar, and the absence of the developments of the breast that are such powerful elements of feminine loveliness. It is the picture of a beautiful girl, to judge of it by the girlish face and hair, the girlishness of the long, slender neck. The first thing to strike the beholder of this girl’s face is the symmetrical character of its delicate beauty. The symmetry is perfect—too perfect, even for a girl of seventeen. The fine pencillings of the eye-brows, the curves immediately beneath the eyes, the superior contours of the cheeks, the line and shadow-line of the long, straight nose, the outlines of the lower parts of the countenance, the curlings of the small kissable lips and dainty chin, are all finely, unsurpassably symmetrical. If the word may be applied to things so lovely and delicate, symmetry is carried even to caricature in the details of this girlish face. Of course the face, so delicately girlish, is deficient in the strength, the indications of force, active or latent, always to be looked for and, in some degree, invariably discernible in the countenance of a man of mark.

Though he never sate to professional painter, Shelley sate to a sculptor of sufficient ability, whose chisel produced a work of art that, indicating with sufficient clearness the two chief defects of the poet’s least comely feature, fortunately, still exists, to give the lie to the foolish pictures, and to protest with mute eloquence against the policy of misrepresentation, which pursues its ends with insolent disregard for the rights of the many thousands of persons, who are interested in knowing the truth and the whole truth, and in believing nothing but the truth, about one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the present century.

But though it offered violence to romantic and conventional notions of poetical beauty, and gave his countenance a contour very different from the profile of the delusive portraits, it may not be imagined that the ‘little turn-up nose’ caused Shelley to be otherwise than a man of a singularly striking and charming appearance. Tall for his years, from his childhood till he attained the fullness of his stature, Shelley had a slender figure that would not have wanted elegance, had it not been for the slight drooping and roundness of his shoulders, the narrowness of his chest, and the forward inclination of his long neck and minute head—peculiarities scarcely reconcilable with all that has been written about his personal stateliness. To imagine that the young man who paced the streets of Oxford and London ‘with bent knees and outstretched neck’ (in the manner described by Hogg), was remarkable for the grace and dignity of his carriage, is to surrender one’s judgment to the sway of romantic biographers. None the less certain, however, is it that there were moments when Shelley’s countenance might be commended for loveliness. Remarkable for a complexion, in which carmine-red and delicate white, instead of being blended, were separately conspicuous, even when it was most freckled by exposure to the sun, the face surmounting his long and slender frame was singularly expressive of intelligence, sympathy, nervous alertness, enthusiasm, and sincerity. Dull in moments of contemplation, the prominent deep-blue eyes of Trelawny’s stag-eyed Shelley were comparable with Byron’s grey-blue eyes, for overpowering vehemence under the impulses of strong and sudden emotion. Though inferior to Byron’s feminine mouth in beauty, and even more deficient than Byron’s mouth in power, Shelley’s mouth—the one symmetrical part of his unsymmetrical countenance—was notable for shapeliness, and alike expressive of sensibility and refinement.

In other particulars, Shelley’s head and face were comparable with Byron’s head and face. Like Byron, the author of Laon and Cythna had a head of striking smallness. It is a matter to be pondered by the physiologists, who maintain no man can be mentally powerful unless he has a big bulk of brain and a big pan to hold it, that the two greatest poets of the nineteenth century were, perhaps, the two smallest-headed Englishmen of their time. Though it wanted the auburn under-glow, the feathery softness, and careful keeping of the Byronic tresses, Shelley’s brown shock—blonde brown in childhood, deep brown ere it began prematurely to turn grey—resembled the locks of his familiar friend and fellow-poet in curling naturally. The most prominent feature of either poet’s face was the one in which he differed most conspicuously from the other. In that feature Byron had greatly the advantage. Had he not grudged the poet whom he hated this personal advantage over the poet whom he loved, Leigh Hunt would not have been at so much pains to describe the faults of Byron’s nose—its excessive massiveness, and its appearance of having been put upon the face, rather than of growing out of it. But whilst inferior to Byron’s face in that important feature, Shelley’s face, in its naturalness and seraphic gentleness, its candour and high simplicity, was possessed of charms no one would venture to attribute to Byron’s more earthly loveliness. In spite of its grand defect, Shelley’s was a face that reminded his two closest friends of works of Italian art. Whilst Peacock speaks of his vanished friend’s resemblance to the portrait of Antonio Leisman in the Florentine Gallery, Hogg likens the sweetest and loftiest element of the poet’s facial beauty to the air of profound religious veneration that may be observed in the best frescoes of the greatest masters of Florence and Rome.

There is no need to inquire how the lovely face of Mr. Colnaghi’s engraving came to be regarded as a portrait of Shelley in his childhood. Still less is there any need to inquire whether the original picture was the work of the exiled French prince to whom it has been attributed. The present writer has no wish to deal disrespectfully with any part of the picture’s story that does not touch the poet’s record. For this work’s purpose it is enough to say authoritatively that the child, whose delicate and exquisitely symmetrical lineaments are exhibited in the Colnaghi engraving, cannot have been the infantile Shelley, because it is not in the nature of things that the poet of unsymmetrical visage and ‘little turn-up nose’ was the development of the child, whose facial loveliness was so perfect an example of facial symmetry, and whose nose could not by any possibility have changed into the tip-tilted feature, described so precisely by the poet himself. Portraits are often strangely mis-assigned; but it is seldom for a portrait to be so egregiously mis-assigned as this so-called picture of the child Shelley. Had not Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams succeeded in palming off on romantic credulity their symmetrical and straight-nosed ‘composition’ as a veritable picture of ‘The Real Shelley,’ it would never have occurred to any one to suggest that the original of the Colnaghi engraving was the poet Shelley at a tender age.

CHAPTER IV.

THE BRENTFORD SCHOOLBOY.

Dr. Greenlaw’s Character—Quality of his School—Medwin’s Anecdotes to the Doctor’s Discredit—Mr. Gellibrand’s Recollections of the Brentford Shelley—The Bullies of the Brentford Playground—Shelley’s Character at the School—His Disposition to Somnambulism—His Delight in Novels—His Wretchedness at School—Shelleyan Egotism—Byronic Egotism—Byron’s Influence on Shelley—Enduring Influence of Novels on Shelley’s Mind—Stories of Boating—Easter Holidays in Wiltshire—‘Essay on Friendship’—Its Biographical Value.

The slight slip of a boy, who under the name of Percy Bysshe Shelley, appeared for the first time in his eleventh year (the third year of the present century) amongst the boys of Dr. Greenlaw’s school at Sion House, Brentford, was no child to prefer the society of overbearing boys to the society of his little sisters, whose playmate he had hitherto been.

Dr. Greenlaw’s home for young gentlemen was a house of forbidding aspect. More than once as they walked from London to Bishopgate (familiar to those who are in the habit of entering Windsor Park from Englefield Green), Shelley directed Hogg’s attention to the gloomy walls of his first boarding-school. The house was unalluring, the master not incapable of outbreaks of anger, the boys by no means innocent of puerile rudeness and inhumanity. But the present writer, who in former time knew some of Dr. Greenlaw’s scholarly descendants, has reason to believe the doctor was a kindlier gentleman, and his school a much less defective establishment, than Mr. Medwin made the world imagine.

Taking much credit to himself for having been at Brentford a sympathetic and condescending senior schoolmate to his little far-away cousin, Tom Medwin speaks with ungenerous resentment of the seminary where they sipt the Pierian spring. All that his bitter words amount to is that Dr. Greenlaw was a pedagogue, and Sion House a seminary, ‘of an old school.’ If the bread served to the boys at breakfast and supper was parsimoniously dressed with butter, the fare was neither better nor worse than the bread and butter usually provided for schoolboys eighty years since. If the Saturday’s pie was a scrap-pie, and a poor specimen of its inferior kind of pie, it was only such a thing as schoolboys of the period were expected to eat with thankfulness. A schoolboy’s toilet, in the days of our grandfathers, was always a short and simple business. As the boys seldom saw the lady, who never harassed or troubled them in any way, Mr. Medwin might as well have forborne to sneer at Mrs. Greenlaw for priding herself less on her husband’s calling, than on being distantly related to the Duke of Argyll. Mr. Medwin was not a little proud of his slight relationship to the Castle Goring Shelleys, though they were not (to put the case mildly) the best of the Sussex families. He might, therefore, have spoken leniently of Mrs. Greenlaw’s sense of the dignity of her people, or been silent about the matter. Himself the son of a country attorney, Mr. Medwin should have written a little less disdainfully of his old schoolfellows, for being ‘mostly the sons of London shopkeepers.’ Nor is the Rev. Dr. Greenlaw (he was in holy orders and had a Scotch degree) to be severely judged if, when pupils were few, he was something less inquisitive than he might have been about the quality of parents. To live, schoolmasters must fill up their beds; and to be placed at school in the same dormitory with a cheesemonger’s son is an indignity, to be forgiven (after forty years) even by the son of a solicitor of the High Court of Judicature.

It may, however, be conceded that Sion House was no more a fit school for the heir of a great county family, than the Clapham school, where the poet’s sisters received their higher education, was a suitable seminary for the daughters of an aristocratic house. Whilst little Bysshe was still making Latin verses in the company of tradesmen’s sons, the elder of his sisters went to the Clapham school, where Harriett Westbrook (the daughter of a licensed victualler) in later time learnt something of French and the answers to Mangnall’s Questions. It may not, however, be inferred that Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, of Field Place, were deficient in proper care for their own dignity, or in proper concern for the welfare of their offspring. Though no place of education for the sons of the English aristocracy, Sion House was greatly superior to the ‘commercial schools’ where tradesmen sent their boys to be trained for the counter and the counting-house. It was a ‘classical school’ for the sons of ordinary professional men (boys like Tom Medwin), and the sons of well-to-do and ambitious tradesmen, bent on putting their boys into the liberal professions. The Clapham school for girls was a school of corresponding quality,—a place of education for the daughters of people moving in the middle way of life. That he sent his children to such schools merely shows that the Squire of Field Place was not possessed by the spirit of exclusiveness, that is a characteristic of aristocratic personages; that he was still far from rating himself with the aristocracy of his county, though he had taken a degree at Oxford, made the grand tour, and risen to represent New Shoreham in the House of Commons. That the children were sent to such schools shows how far the head of the family (old Mr. Bysshe Shelley, the son of the Newark apothecary and the friend of Graham, the quack) was from over-estimating his social position; how far he was from deeming himself one of the dignitaries of his shire, though he had married the heiress of Penshurst, and adding acre to acre, was rich enough to spend tens of thousands on the big castle, which he never finished or inhabited.

Instead of enjoying the status, which delusive biographers declare them to have enjoyed for successive centuries, the poet’s people were in his childhood only emerging from the middle class of society. Planted though they had been for some time within the outer breastworks of provincial gentility, they were still regarded by their patrician neighbours as people of ambiguous quality,—too wealthy to be rated with mere ‘gentle populace,’ and at the same time, too wanting in local influence and ancestral dignity to be rated with the élite of ‘the county.’ Fortunate though it had been, old Mr. Bysshe Shelley’s career was more calculated to provoke scandal than conciliate social sentiment. Though it had done much for his enrichment, his second marriage had also caused leading families of Sussex and Kent to regard him with animosity, and speak of him with disapproval. Strange stories were told of the ways in which the old man had made money,—was still making money. The sordid tastes and habits, that rendered him equally despicable and pitiable in his senility, were already revealing themselves, and confirming people of honest pride and good principle in their resolve to hold aloof from him. To personages of the county, who had long looked down upon them as obtrusive upstarts, the father and son grew more distasteful in proportion as they grew richer. Instead of being diminished, this disfavour was for a time quickened by the civilities, which for political reasons the Duke of Norfolk thought fit to offer to the Horsham capitalist and the Member for New Shoreham. Both within and without the lines of the Liberal party, dislike of these ‘new men’ was stimulated by the growing opinion that, if the younger kept his seat for the Sussex borough, and voted steadily in accordance with the Duke’s pleasure, the elder of them would in a few years be raised to the dignity for which he had long hungered.

Thus regarded in Sussex, it is not surprising that the poet’s father and grandfather lived more within the lines of their proper middle-class connexion, than with the higher gentry of their neighbourhood, and that, in selecting schools for his children, Mr. Timothy Shelley acted in harmony with the views of his middle-class friends and relations. It is not surprising that little Bysshe was sent to the school that was good enough for the boys of people like the Medwins, and none too good for the tradesmen’s sons who came between the wind and Tom Medwin’s nobility. Nor is it surprising that in later time little Bysshe’s sisters were sent to the suburban academy, where the youngest of them became intimate with Harriett Westbrook,—the lovely child of ‘Jew Westbrook,’ the licensed victualler. Had he in 1802 felt more certain of getting the baronetcy for which he was playing (and won only four years later—1806), it is probable that the Horsham money-maker would have loosened his purse-string, and told his son (the M.P.) that Sion House was not good enough school for the heir of the Castle Goring Shelleys. Had the father and son foreseen what embarrassment and scandal would come to the Castle Goring Shelleys from friendships made at the Clapham girls’-school, it is probable that the poet’s sisters would have been sent to a more select seminary, or have been educated, even to the finishing touches of their education, at Field Place.

That the Reverend Dr. Greenlaw was a fairly sufficient pedagogue may be inferred even from the reluctant admissions of the writer, who is our chief source of information respecting little Bysshe’s life at Sion House. Whilst telling apocryphal stories to the discredit of his scholarship, Medwin concedes that the Doctor was ‘a tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,’ drilled his pupils assiduously in Homer, and carried them ‘in his own way’ through some of the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Mr. Medwin was not so precisely accurate a writer that we must accept all his statements to the schoolmaster’s disadvantage. Possibly, in recalling the teacher’s way of ‘driving straightforwards in defiance of obstacles,’ the biographer only remembered his own way of dealing with choruses and other perplexing passages of the Greek dramatists. The historian who misquoted the Ovidian verses, in his worst and most damaging story against the Doctor, may also have misquoted the sorry verses inscribed on the Scotch mull which Charles Mackintosh (a former pupil at Sion House) gave his preceptor. If the verses of the mull were as bad as the biographer represents, and were (as the same authority alleges) the production of the Doctor’s own head and hand, their extreme badness disproves the assertion that the Doctor ‘was a tolerable Greek and Latin Scholar.’ However much misquoted in Medwin’s Life of Shelley, the verses must have been bad; but it is more probable that ‘Carolus Mackintosh ... alumnus’ composed the lame lines inscribed upon his gift, than that they were put together by ‘the tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,’ who had grown grey in teaching boys to make Latin verses. Recollections after a lapse of forty years, touching the infirmities of former schoolmasters, should be regarded with suspicion, even when they proceed from habitually careful narrators. But when a gentleman of almost proverbial inaccuracy entertains the world with irreconcilable reminiscences of the same individual, he may be regarded as labouring for a moment under the besetting infirmity, that always weakens Mr. Medwin’s testimony, and sometimes deprives it of all value.

That the successful schoolmaster (bound alike by his interest and the obligations of his office to be mindful of the proprieties) disgusted little Bysshe, and delighted the rest of the class with obscene jocosity in reference to a familiar passage of the Æneid, is less probable than that Tom Medwin’s memory betrayed him. It is easier to believe that in a mood of unusual irritability and dullness Dr. Greenlaw discovered execrable Latinity in the Ovidian lines:

‘Me miserum! quanti montes volvuntur aquarum!
Jam, jam tacturas sidera summa putes,’—

which little Bysshe ‘gave in’ as verses of his own manufacture. ‘Jam, jam!’ the Doctor is said to have exclaimed during the course of animadversions that were emphasized with slaps administered to the child’s small cheeks and ears. ‘Jam, jam! Pooh, pooh, boy! raspberry jam! Do you think you are at your mother’s? Don’t you know that I have a sovereign objection to those two monosyllables, with which schoolboys cram their verses? haven’t I told you so a hundred times already? “Tacturas sidera summa putes,”—what, do the waves on the coast of Sussex strike the stars, eh?—“summa sidera,”—who does not know that the stars are high? Where did you find that epithet?—in your Gradus ad Parnassum, I suppose. You will never mount so high. “Putes!” you may think this very fine, but to me it is all balderdash, hyperbolical stuff. There’ (with a final box on the little fellow’s nearest ear), ‘go now, sir, and see if you can’t write something better!’

It is consolatory to reflect that, though he should not have been cuffed and exposed to the riotous ridicule of his school-fellows for writing Latin verses as badly as Ovid wrote them, the culprit merited some kind of punishment for ‘giving in’ as his own the verses that were not his own,—an act of deception common enough with schoolboys, but scarcely reconcilable with the severe truthfulness, which is said (by the Shelleyan enthusiasts) to have distinguished him from his childhood to his last hour. ‘He was,’ says Lady Shelley in her Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources, ‘more outspoken and truth-loving than other boys.’

With this anecdote of Latin verses, given in to the Doctor of the Brentford school, may be coupled a story, which the late Mr. Gellibrand used to tell, somewhat to the discredit of little Bysshe. Just about Shelley’s age, though placed in a lower form of the school than Shelley’s, Gellibrand was trying to put together a nonsense Latin verse in the way of scholastic duty, when Bysshe said, ‘Give me your slate, and I will do it for you and you can go.’ Trusting his friend, Gellibrand surrendered his slate and went off to play. The verses Shelley wrote on the slate ran,—

‘Hos ego versiculos scripsi,
Sed non ego feci.’

On being ‘given in,’ by a boy who could not make a nonsense ‘line’ without racking his brain, these verses may well have attracted the master’s attention. To the question, ‘Did you write this?’ Gellibrand of course answered ‘Yes.’ Of course, also, the matter was inquired into further; the result being that Gellibrand received a whipping, for which he paid Shelley out with a ‘pummelling.’

Though heavy, the blows he received for the Jam-jam verses were by no means the sharpest and most penetrating that came from time to time to little Bysshe Shelley from the same hand. Eighty years since our boys were taken from the nursery and confided to the schoolmaster, in the same way that pups of choicest breed were given over to the very slender mercy of the under-gamekeeper. In either case it was known what was in store for the young and helpless creatures. It was needful for these young things to be licked into shape and form and good behaviour,—for the small boys to be whipt into bigger boys, and then into serviceable men; and for the young dogs to be whipt into good sporting dogs. Relying on the wisdom of his ancestors, the English gentleman believed in the Coptic proverb, which declares that ‘the stick came down from heaven,’ To train boys and dogs the stick was needful. Whilst the tender-hearted father hoped silently that much of the stick would not be needed, the father of no more than average humanity was jubilant about the stick, confident that youngsters needed it, jocular about its power to do them good. Like George the Third, who told his sons’ tutors to whip them when they wanted it (but for this order, how badly George the Fourth might have turned out!). Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P. for New Shoreham, sent little Bysshe to Sion House, with the understanding that he would be whipt, and well whipt too, when he wanted it. Mrs. Shelley knew what was in store for the little fellow, when she put the plum-cake into his box and hoped he would enjoy it. The foreknowledge did not make the lady sorrowful. Was it not written, that to spare the rod was to spoil the child? It is hard on schoolmasters that they should be required to bear the odium of an educational method, so universally approved two generations since, and sanctioned by the highest authority.

Elderly (not to say old) gentlemen of ‘the old school’ still talk and write cheerily of the good old birch. In his later novels the late Lord Lytton uttered several pleasantries about the antique instrument of domestic torture. But he probably took another view of the matter, when he was under it. Though the great Thackeray wrote with characteristic sprightliness and piquancy of interviews with ‘the Doctor’ in his study,—interviews attended with swishing sounds and shrill cries of puerile protest, audible through the strong doors of the same awful room,—he was alive to the tragic side of the comic business. Only a few years before his death, he spoke to an attentive mahogany-tree of one of these ‘interviews with the Doctor,’ in which he had figured as passive principal at a preparatory school, where he acquired some of the rudiments of human knowledge, before going to Charterhouse. ‘And can you still remember what it felt like?’ inquired one of the listeners. ‘Remember it! It was like ——!’ screamed the witness to his own early grief, raising his voice and eyebrows till they were comically eloquent of pain and affright, as he named a place whither so excellent a novelist cannot be supposed to have gone. Like little Makepeace, little Bysshe had interviews with the Doctor between the four walls of the Doctor’s study,—interviews from which the nervous boy retired, with fury and horror in his face and at his heart, to the schoolroom full of heartless boys, whose only expression of concern at his misadventure was to ask him ‘how he liked it.’ All this is so much a matter of course that nothing would be said of it in these pages, were it not for the general opinion that this medicine of childhood (as an old writer pleasantly designates the discipline of the rod) not only caused the future poet the usual amount of transient physical annoyance, but had also an enduring and by no means beneficial effect on his temper and his disposition towards every kind of human government. It has been urged by successive biographers that this bitter physic, instead of curing his infantile ill-humours, aggravated them seriously, and was one of the several influences that set him at war with society from the outset of his career. Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley (the poet’s second wife and his daughter-in-law) both take this view of the discipline that vexed him both at Brentford and Eton. And though he does not hold the birch largely accountable for Queen Mab, the present writer is by no means certain that the two ladies are so entirely wrong on this matter, as they are on other matters of the poet’s character and story.

Notwithstanding the incidents, which may have disposed him to rate his Brentford preceptor as one of his earlier tyrants, there is evidence that, after coming to manhood, Shelley remembered Dr. Greenlaw with qualified approval, if not with affection. As they walked past the gloomy brick house to which he had just called his companion’s attention, Shelley ‘spoke of the master, Doctor Greenlaw, not without respect, saying, “he was a hard-headed Scotchman, and man of rather liberal opinions.”’ To be tinctured with liberality of sentiment was, in Shelley’s opinion, to have a quality of goodness.

If Medwin was justified in saying that ‘Sion House was a perfect hell’ to Shelley, it is probable that the bullies of the playground were more accountable than the discipline of the schoolroom for the boy’s hatred of the place. Numbering about sixty scholars, some of whom were seventeen or eighteen years old, the school—governed out of school-hours by bullies, who might bully any one weak enough to be bullied, instead of by ‘masters’ entitled to bully only their own fags—was just the place to be fruitful of misery for a shy, nervous, mammy-sick lad; lacking the muscle and pluck to hold his own with boys of his own age. On appearing for the first time in the playground—fenced with four high walls, and adorned with the solitary tree, to which the school-bell was hung—the child from Field Place found himself surrounded by a mob of inquisitive urchins, who at a glance saw he had neither the strength nor the courage to answer a rough word with a ready blow. Could he play at pegtop? at marbles? at hopscotch? at cricket? As each of these questions was answered in the negative, a cry of derision went up from his inquisitors. His girlish looks and long hair, his red-and-white complexion and the slightness of his long (not oval) face provoked uncomplimentary criticism. Then came questions about his home. Had he any sisters? What were their names? Where did they live? Had he a mother? What was his father? What was he ‘blubbing’ about? On hearing that his father was a Member of Parliament, some of the boys (possibly the tradesmen’s sons) intimated that he had better not give himself airs.

Resembling Byron in divers matters already submitted to the reader’s consideration, and in other matters to be noticed in later pages of this work, Shelley resembled him also, from childhood to his latest hour, in being a singular combination of feminine weakness and masculine strength. Remarkable for boyish resoluteness and energy, the Byron of Aberdeen, Harrow, and Cambridge, was no less remarkable for girlish sensibility and softness. Feminine in the emotional forces of his nature, the Byron of ‘the Pilgrimage,’ the London drawing-rooms, the Italian exile, and the expedition to Greece, was rich also in manly daring and combativeness. A similar account may be given of Shelley’s constitution and temper. In his earlier time a boy on one side of his nature, he was a girl on the other. If ‘his port’ (to use Hogg’s words) ‘had the meekness of a maiden’ in his later time, it possessed also the dignity of manliness. In moments of sudden peril it was discovered that fear had no chamber in the heart, of which Hogg wrote ‘the heart of the young virgin, who had never crossed her father’s threshold to encounter the rude world, could not be more susceptible of all the sweet charities than his.’ It is remarkable how these two inseparable poets (inseparable for ever! notwithstanding all the efforts of the Shelleyan enthusiasts to disassociate them) impressed their closest friends alternately by their manliness and their womanliness. The biographer, who is eloquent about the manliness of Shelley’s carriage, could not recall this friend of his heart and holder of his admiration, without remembering his meek and maidenly bearing and virginal sensibility. Even when he was bearing testimony to Byron’s manly endowments, Hobhouse could not refrain from glancing at those of the poet’s weaknesses, that, resembling ‘a portion of his virtues, were of a feminine character—so that the affection felt for him was as that for a favourite and sometimes froward sister.’

At Brentford the girlish elements of Bysshe’s nature were in the ascendant, the masculine elements altogether in abeyance. Possibly the latter elements had never manifested themselves at Field Place, where the little fellow, with younger sisters for his playmates, had lived at the end of his mother’s apron-string something too long. If they had shown themselves in his earlier childhood, they seem to have retired from view during his stay at Dr. Greenlaw’s school. Bearing a stronger likeness to the Geordie Byron, of Aberdeen High School, who fell a-weeping before his classmates, on being required for the first time to answer to the proud title of ‘Dominus,’ than to the Geordie Byron of the same school, who, notwithstanding his lameness, used to spring (in his hopping way) with clenched fists and flashing eyes at boys of superior size and strength, little Bysshe seems throughout his time at Sion House to have justified the disdain in which he was held, alike by the big and the small bullies of the dismal playground, as a chicken-heart and a milk-sop. His old schoolfellow, Gellibrand, who died something over twelve months in his ninety-third year, used to describe the Shelley of Dr. Greenlaw’s seminary as a ‘girl in boy’s clothes, fighting with open hands and rolling on the floor when flogged, not from the pain, but “from a sense of indignity.”’ (Vide Mr. Augustine Birrell’s letter to the Athenæum of 3rd May, 1884.)

Scared and cowed by the first greetings of the playground, he seems never to have gained heart to learn the games, of which he had been compelled to confess a shameful ignorance, or to repay with boyish energy and in proper style the snubs and blows of boys as small as himself. Every boy’s hand was raised against him; and when he raised his own in retaliation, it was to slap with open palm. What the big bullies bade him do, he did meekly and often to his cost. When they ordered him to run after their balls, he obeyed till he was ready to drop with fatigue. When they ordered him to fetch books from the circulating library, to ‘truck’ Latin dictionaries and other scholastic volumes (appraised by avoirdupois weight) with the grocer for lumps of cheese or sweetstuff, he broke bounds and did their commands, earning once and again a smart punishment ‘from the Doctor,’ by his submissiveness to lawless orders. But he never joined of his own will in the pastimes of his schoolfellows, great or small. Moping in corners by himself, when the other boys were playing clamorously at prisoners’ bars or leap-frog, with their marbles or their tops, he counted the days till next breaking-up day, recalled the pleasures of the garden where his little sisters had been his sturdiest playmates, or conned the pages of stories, borrowed from the circulating library. Sometimes on half-holidays he loitered for the hour together under the southern wall of the playground, as far as possible out of the way of his uncongenial companions. Sometimes out of pity for the child’s solitariness and misery, Medwin left the sports of the yard, and walked with his little cousin to and fro under the high wall. It pleased the senior cousin long after the younger cousin’s death to imagine, that Shelley was mindful of these walks and the kindness thus shown him when, in the description of an antique group, he wrote, ‘Look, the figures are walking with a sauntering and idle pace, and talking to each other as they walk, as you may have seen a younger and an elder boy at school, walking in some grassy spot of the playground, with that tender friendship for each other which the age inspires.’

In this stage of his existence, little Bysshe resembled Geordie Byron at a somewhat earlier age, in having the nervous diathesis that often disposes children to walk in their sleep, when suffering from derangement of the stomach. At least, on one occasion, Geordie Byron was a somnambulist at Aberdeen. At least, on one occasion, Bysshe Shelley was a somnambulist during the time he passed under Dr. Greenlaw’s government. More than forty years later, Medwin remembered how the boy looked, when after leaving his proper bedroom he advanced with slow steps, one summer night, to the open window of the dormitory he had no right to enter. Seeing that he was asleep, and unaware that sleep-walkers should be awakened gradually, Medwin jumped from bed and, seizing him quickly, roused the somnambulist with a suddenness that gave him a painful shock, attended with severe nervous erethism. In the morning Shelley paid another penalty for the misbehaviour of his nerves. Boys taken at night in a wrong bed-room were offenders against a wholesome domestic rule, to be punished even though the offence was unintentional. ‘I remember,’ says Medwin, ‘that he was severely punished for this involuntary transgression.’ It does not appear how he was punished, or whether it was known to the punisher that the breach of law had been committed during sleep.

Though he was not guilty of another walk in his sleep, the nervous and delicate boy was still visited by ‘waking dreams, a sort of lethargy and abstraction that became habitual to him.’ Whilst he was under the influence of these day-dreams, his prominent blue eyes were glazed with a peculiar dullness, and were equally inexpressive and insensible of external objects. As soon as the visitations were over, his eyes flashed, his lips quivered, and he spoke with a tremulous voice that was strangely and painfully indicative of nervous agitation and distress. ‘A sort of ecstasy,’ says Medwin, ‘came over him, and he talked more like a spirit or an angel than a human being.’ As the words convey the intended impression, there is no need to inquire in what respect the speech of a human creature differs from the speech of a spirit, or to imagine the circumstances under which Mr. Medwin may have been permitted to overhear the talk of angels.

Under the manifold vexations and sorrows that preyed upon his feelings at Sion House, Shelley found solace and intermissions of grief in the perusal of blue books,—no folios of parliamentary manufacture and information; but the little blue-covered volumes of extremely exciting and unwholesome prose-fiction, that were to be bought at sixpence a-piece of ordinary booksellers in the earlier decades of the present century. He was also a greedy devourer of tales (touching haunted castles, magicians, picturesque brigands, and mysterious murderers) that proceeded from writers, who did not condescend to offer their productions to the public eye, in the vulgar little ‘blue books,’ or in any form less acceptable to connoisseurs of elegant literature than board-bound volumes. It is something to the honour of prose-fiction that the two greatest poets of the nineteenth century may be said to have been mentally suckled and reared on novels from infancy to adult age,—taught by novels how to think and feel, and how to make others think and feel. It is alike true of Byron and Shelley, that the germs of much that is most delightful and admirable in their finest poems must be sought in old novels. John Moore’s Zeluco was not more influential in the production of Childe Harold, than Zofloya or the Moor was influential in the production of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, those crude and unutterably ridiculous achievements of Shelley’s youthful pen, which, offering to their amused perusers the feeble fancies and puerile conceits that, appearing and reappearing in successive volumes, developed eventually into vigorous creations and exquisite examples of poetic imagery,—exhibit also the rude notions and embryonic reasonings, that in the course of a few years grew and shaped themselves in the fundamental principles and main features of his philosophy on matters pertaining to politics, social economy, and religion.

It is a question whether the recollections of misery endured at school, which occupy three of the familiar stanzas to ‘Mary,’ should be regarded as reminiscences of trials the poet underwent at Sion House, or of sorrows that moved him to tears at Eton. Mrs. Shelley had no doubt the stanzas referred to the public school; and Lady Shelley is no less confident that her father-in-law was thinking of the Eton playing-grounds, when he wrote in the dedicatory prelude to Laon and Cythna:

‘Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first
The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass;
I do remember well the hour which burst
My spirit’s sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was,
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I knew not why; until there rose
From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes—
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.
‘And then I clasped my hands and looked around,
But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground—
So without shame, I spake:—“I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannise,
Without reproach or check.” I then controuled
My tears; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.
‘And from that hour did I with earnest thought
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore;
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn, but from that secret store
Wrought linked-armour for my soul, before
It might walk forth to war upon mankind;
Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.’

It has been usual with Shelley’s biographers to deal with these verses as though, besides referring to Eton, they afford a substantially accurate account of trouble undergone, resolutions formed, and action taken by the poet whilst he was at Eton. To the Shelleyan enthusiasts, it is heresy to question the strict and severe historic veracity of any particular statement of this piece of melodious egotism. To them it is an affair of certainty that the grass glittered, the boy wept, the voices came from the school-house, the weeping youth made virtuous resolves, precisely as, and when, the poetry represents. The verses are given in evidence that Shelley neglected Latin and Greek in order that he might devote all his best energies to chemistry, astronomy, electricity, pneumatics,—in brief, to those ‘scientific pursuits,’ about which so much fantastic nonsense has been printed by the more fervid and less discreet of his eulogists. To this way of reading and handling these verses, is mainly referable the equally general and false notion that Shelley’s principal employment at Eton was to make ‘linked armour for his soul’ out of materials prohibited to ingenuous youth by the teachers of his despotic school,—and that his one purpose in forging this linked armour for his soul, was that he might equip himself for ‘walking forth to war among mankind,’ i.e. for playing the part of a political revolutionist and social reformer, as soon as he should be his own master.

There is the less need to trouble oneself seriously with the question whether the verses refer to Sion House or Eton, because it is certain they do not correspond, in all their chief particulars, to his life at either school. Whilst it is certain that his studies at the private school were the studies prescribed by Dr. Greenlaw (unless the not-actually-prohibited perusal of novels is to be rated as ‘study’), it is no less certain that he never grossly neglected the studies of either school. Far from neglecting the ordinary scholastic exercises of an Eton boy in the degree implied by the words,

‘Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn,’

it is certain that, without holding steadily a high place in any of the higher forms, he acquired something more than a fair amount of the only learning imparted to boys at Eton eighty years since, and displayed remarkable aptitude and skill in making Latin verses,—an important part of what his tyrants knew and taught. The evidence is conclusive that, at Eton he was a facile and clever maker of Latin verses. Medwin speaks to ‘his capacity for writing Latin verses,’ and gives some examples of the capacity, that may, at least, be styled creditable performances for a public school-boy. Long after his abrupt withdrawal from the school, the excellence of Shelley’s Latin verses was remembered by old Etonians. Whilst his readiness in the verse-maker’s art was described as ‘wonderful’ by Mr. Packe, another of his former schoolmates at Eton (Mr. Walter S. Halliday) wrote of the same faculty to Lady Shelley, ‘his power of Latin versification’ was ‘marvellous.’ Hogg certifies that, though more than a year elapsed between his retirement from Eton and his going into residence at University College—a period during which he certainly omitted to enlarge his classical attainments—Shelley came up to Oxford an expert and singularly quick Latin verse-maker, and a ready writer of Latin prose. So much for the poet’s vaunt that he did not care to learn what the Eton masters could teach him.

On the other hand, it is certain that, whilst carrying away from Eton something more than a creditable amount of the learning to be acquired in the classes, Shelley learnt nothing at the school by irregular and unrecognized study to justify the assertion that, whilst a schoolboy, he gathered ‘knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,’ and armed himself for the battle of life with weapons his official teachers would fain have kept from his hands. His scientific studies were the mere sports of a schoolboy, playing idly with an air-pump, an electrical battery, and a few acids and alkalies. Instead of spending his leisure at Eton in the serious pursuits of natural science, he employed it chiefly in literary essays, that show him to have been possessed by an ambition scarcely compatible with an enthusiasm for scientific investigation and a yearning for scientific celebrity.

That both Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley had considerable, though insufficient, grounds for regarding the dedicatory stanzas as a record of the poet’s experiences at Eton, is unquestionable. Mrs. Shelley could, doubtless, have defended her view of the verses with words spoken by her husband, who entertained her with several equally strange and delusive stories of his life at the public school. Besides the poet’s authority, Lady Shelley could, perhaps, produce other evidence to justify her concurrence with Mrs. Shelley’s opinion. Whilst he deems it possible that Shelley was thinking more of Eton than Brentford, when he committed the verses to paper, the present writer has no doubt whatever that the poet, soon after their composition and ever afterwards, regarded the three stanzas as veracious autobiography—as a faithful poetical record of what he had suffered, resolved, and done, when he was under Dr. Keate’s rigorous government. But the poet’s words may not be produced as sure evidence respecting the tenor and chief incidents of his career. From manhood’s threshold to his last hour, he was subject to strange delusions about his own story; some of the marvellous misconceptions having reference to matters of quite recent occurrence. ‘Had he,’ says Hogg, ‘written to ten different individuals the history of some proceeding in which he was himself a party and an eye-witness, each of his ten reports would have varied from the rest in essential and important circumstances. The relation given on the morrow would be unlike that of to-day, as the latter would contradict the tale of yesterday.’ Peacock, who also knew and loved him well, bears similar testimony to the looseness and inaccuracy of the poet’s statements about his own affairs, even about those of his affairs, respecting which (had he been a man of ordinary exactness and fidelity to facts) he would be naturally regarded as the best source of information. To escape the disagreeable necessity of thinking him deliberately untruthful, Thomas Love Peacock had recourse to the notion that his friend was the victim of ‘semi-delusions.’ With all his desire to palliate his friend’s besetting frailty, so as to relieve it of the odium of sheer untruthfulness, Peacock, in his inability to rate the delusive fancies as sincere and perfect delusions, came to the conclusion that they were only ‘semi-delusions;’ that the mis-statements of the poet’s mouth and pen were referable in equal proportions to delusive fancy and influences distinct from delusion. Whatever their show of autobiographic purport and sincerity, it is obvious that the verses of a poet, suffering from so perplexing an infirmity, differ widely in evidential value from the autobiographic statements of an ordinary individual.

How far the Byronic poems should be held accountable for Shelley’s Byronic way of dealing with his personal story in poems offered to the world, is a question deserving more consideration than can be given to it in this chapter. At this early point of an attempt to exhibit ‘the Real Shelley,’ it is, however, well to indicate why criticism should deal with the egotisms of the Shelleyan poems precisely as criticism has long dealt with the egotisms of the Byronic poems.

However people may differ about the respective merits of the two poets, all persons must allow that Byron and Shelley were both egotists in the superlative degree,—and that differing from other poets in more unusual and admirable qualities, they differ from them also in surcharging their magnificent poetry with more or less misleading references to their private concerns, and with emotion and sentiment arising from their purely personal interests,—often from their purely personal discontents. In this respect, both poets strayed from the high poetic path; sacrificing art to egotism, fame to foible, greatness to vanity. If Childe Harold was the wail of a single romantic sufferer for his own sake, Laon and Cythna was the cry of a single romantic sufferer for his own as well as the world’s sake. The poet’s personality is forced upon the reader’s notice no less resolutely in Shelley’s than in Byron’s poem. If it was Byron’s vanity to demand human sympathy as the victim of fate, it was Shelley’s vanity to solicit it as the victim of persecution.

Whilst the man of sin and mystery invited the world to admire his proud endurance of the doom that distinguished him from all other mortals, the angel of goodness and light invited mankind to worship him, for his unselfishness, his impatience of evil, his abhorrence of oppression, his ineffable benevolence, his heroic readiness to perish for the good of his species. Both actors were equals in sincerity and in dishonesty. The man who has still to discover that sincerity underlies almost every display of human affectation, is a man who has failed in justice to a considerable proportion of his species. The pretender ever plays the character he desires in the most secret chamber of his heart to be mistaken for. Byron and Shelley were alike actors and alike sincere, each taking a part accordant with his conceptions of the sublime and admirable in human nature. In assuming the character of a libertine,

‘A shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee,’

Byron assumed the character that interested and fascinated him. In assuming the character of the social martyr, Shelley, true to his own nature, selected the character that appeared to him the most admirable. Both characters were taken from the marvellous creations of the romantic literature on which the two poets fed from childhood to years of discretion. It was a literature that may be styled the romantic literature of the good principle and the evil principle. In taking a representative of the evil principle for his model, Byron displayed his genuine disposition which, in spite of his engaging qualities and several generous endowments, was a disposition towards evil. In determining to be a representative of the good principle of human existence, as that existence was exhibited in the ‘blue books,’ and other literature of the circulating libraries, Shelley made a choice no less true to his own more gentle and earnest nature. Mere boys when they forced themselves into notoriety, neither of them could readily relinquish the part,—chosen so easily and naturally. Shelley determined to be on the side of the angels, because his disposition was in the main towards goodness; Byron went with the devils, because he found them upon the whole better and more congenial company than the angels of light.

In other respects, their resemblance was striking. Endowed with a memory that equalled Byron’s memory in retentiveness, though more liable to illusions, an imagination even more powerful than Byron’s imagination, and a sensibility no less acute than Byron’s sensibility, Shelley resembled Byron also in his habit of brooding over old sorrows, intensifying them by the exercise of fancy, and using them as instruments of self-torture. Certainly in some degree, probably in a high degree, this habit is referable to the influence of Byron’s genius,—to the influence of the Byronic poems, and also of their popularity. Whilst success never fails to produce imitators, the affectations of the successful are curiously infectious. This was notably the case with Byron’s success, that putting the younger poets and poetasters into turn-down collars, caused them to train their voices to notes of what they deemed Byronic melancholy, and to set their features into what they deemed expressions of Byronic bitterness, and melancholy. It is not suggested that Shelley was for a single minute one of the Byro-maniacal apes. It is not hinted that he ever imitated Byron, except in the way in which a loyal, enthusiastic, and altogether honest disciple may be seen to imitate a great master.

From his boyhood to his last year, Shelley regarded Byron with a generous admiration, that once and again expressed itself in almost idolatrous language. Unlike the Shelleyan fanatics, who seek to exalt their favourite by decrying the only modern English poet likely to be rated as his superior, Shelley ever regarded Byron as the greatest living master of their art. Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Keats, Tom Moore, Leigh Hunt, to say nothing of minor minstrels, all had a share of Shelley’s never-stinted homage, but he never for any long time thought of putting the best and strongest of them on equality with the incomparable Byron. To remember the terms in which he wrote and spoke of Byron, is to think with a smile of all that has been written in these later years by poetasters and critics to Byron’s discredit.

The enthusiasts, who have so clear a perception of the signs of Shelley’s influence over Byron in the Third Canto of Childe Harold, are curiously blind to the far more important and conspicuous indications of Byron’s influence on Shelley in Laon and Cythna. When the most has been said of the manifestations of Shelleyan thought in Byron’s poem, it cannot be questioned that had the younger of the two poets never lived, the four Cantos of Childe Harold would have been substantially the same poem they now are. On the other hand, it is impossible for any one but a Shelleyan enthusiast to believe that Laon and Cythna would have been the same poem it now is, had Byron never come into existence. Written in the summer of 1817, when the poet had been for five years, like all the younger poets of his time, living under the domination of Byron’s intellect, and had been for a still longer period an enthusiastic admirer of Byron’s writings; written in the summer following the one in which the still youthful aspirant to poetical renown had come under the personal influence of the great poet, whom he had so long desired to know personally, and had made at least one futile attempt to approach, Laon and Cythna bears the most distinct marks of Byron’s influence in Shelley’s selection of the Spenserian measure, in the poem’s Byronic egotisms, and in the pains taken by the poet to identify himself with the hero of the narrative. In all these particulars (to say nothing of other particulars which the reader of these pages can discover for himself), Laon and Cythna resembles Childe Harold, just as the painting by a young artist, abounding in originality and natural vigour, is often seen to resemble the painting of an older artist, whose notions and treatment of colour, and whose manipulatory address, have been a manifest force in the aspirant’s education. Just as the painting of the younger artist in form and colour, without being either ‘a copy,’ or even ‘an imitation,’ in any dishonourable sense of the term, bears to the painting of the master a certain resemblance (of tone and treatment) that causes both works to be regarded in later times as ‘works of the same school,’ Shelley’s great poem resembles Byron’s great poem.

Byron was in no degree accountable either for the ‘story’ of Shelley’s poem, or for its incidents and conceptions of character. The same may be said of the prevailing sentiments, subordinate aims, and main purpose of the poem. Whilst the prevailing sentiments of the poem are altogether foreign to Byron’s views on the religious, political, and social questions dealt with in Laon and Cythna, his writings are in evidence that he must have regarded Shelley’s approval of ‘Laon’s’ incest with his own sister as revolting in the highest degree. But though the substance of this extraordinary poem could not have proceeded from Byron’s brain and pen, the form of the work is distinctly Byronic. Shelley cannot have been unconscious of this resemblance of his poem to what was at that time Byron’s greatest achievement in song. Qui s’excuse s’accuse. The very words of the Preface, in which he anticipates a charge of ‘presuming to enter into competition with our greatest contemporary poets,’ and, whilst disclaiming the presumption, declares his ‘unwillingness to tread in the footsteps of any who preceded him,’ are words of evidence that he was fully and uneasily alive to the resemblance. His curious way of accounting for his choice of the measure which Byron’s poem had rendered more popular for the moment than any other measure, is only the poet’s attempt to shut his eyes to the fact, that he selected the measure because Childe Harold had rendered it more agreeable to his own ear than any other, and had also made it the measure most likely to commend his poem to the public taste. ‘I have,’ he says, ‘adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical harmony than the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but because in the latter, there is no shelter for mediocrity; you must either succeed or fail.’ Though Byron doubtless smiled at this reason for the adoption of the measure, which he had in a certain sense made his own, he must have been gratified by the delicate compliment to the poet who had adopted it with success.

Using the Byronic measure (for the Spenserian measure had become for the moment Byron’s property), Shelley made a Byronic use of matter taken from romances devoured in his childhood. ‘Treading in the footsteps’ of his master, notwithstanding his assertions to the contrary, Shelley followed the Byronic example in attaching his own personality to the hero of his poem. Not content with hinting poetically in the Dedicatory Stanzas to Mary that he and Laon are one, the author of Laon and Cythna is at pains to declare more fully and precisely in the prose of his Preface that Laon’s views on matters of religion and politics, on questions of government and misgovernment, on the vices of ecclesiasticism and the merits of vegetarianism, on the relations of the sexes and the æsthetics of love, are the views of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., who has studied human nature in Switzerland as well as England, and who, in consideration of his ‘having trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc,’ should be regarded as a gentleman especially educated and peculiarly qualified to dogmatize on such matters to English persons who have never crossed the Channel. Both in the poem and dedicatory prelude he seizes every opportunity to impress on the reader that Percy Bysshe Shelley is Laon, the apostle of ‘Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,’ and that this Preacher of the ‘New Evangel,’ who at the close of the poem sails into Paradise with his sister and the offspring of their incestuous intercourse in a boat made of

‘one curved shell of hollow pearl,
Almost translucent with the light divine
Of her within,’

is no other than Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., eldest son of the Member of Parliament for New Shoreham, and heir-apparent to a Sussex baronetcy. In these Shelleyan egotisms the critical reader of the marvellous poem recognizes the very touch and trick of Byron’s way of dressing up details of his domestic woes and personal story for the delight and mystification of his readers. One of the most pathetic and effective of the egotisms is the poet’s account of the misery he endured from hard-hearted masters and malicious boys whilst he was at school.

Just as Byron seasoned the introductory stanzas of Childe Harold’s first canto with more or less imaginary particulars of his misspent youth, when

‘Few earthly things found favour in his sight,
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree,’

Shelley seasoned the dedicatory verses of Laon and Cythna with references to the wretchedness that preyed upon him when, walking forth upon the glittering grass, he wept and

‘knew not why; until there rose
From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes—
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.’

Both descriptions were equally truthful and untruthful. The basis of truth in Byron’s poetical narrative of his misspent youth is that he kept the girl at Brompton who used to ride and walk about London in boy’s clothes, and that when he entertained three or four old college friends at Newstead, they talked a good deal of nonsense and drank rather more champagne than was good for them. The basis of truth in Shelley’s narrative of his wretched boyhood is that he was often unhappy at school (very unhappy at Brentford), and that being of a soft and girlish temperament when he was at Sion House, he sometimes fell a-weeping because the ‘boys were so unkind to him.’ The Shelleyan narrative is not historically exact to his doings and experiences in either of his two schools. At Brentford he was not remarkably insubordinate (as he was at Eton), and did nothing to give the faintest justificatory colour to his vaunt of having devoted himself to studies prohibited or discountenanced by the masters of the establishment. At Eton (where, though often unhappy, he was less given to crying than in his Brentford days), instead of neglecting the studies of the college, he attained to considerable excellence in them. Upon the whole, the weeping boy ‘upon the glittering grass’ bears more resemblance to the chicken-heart and milksop of Dr. Greenlaw’s playground than to the unruly, fitfully riotous, and inordinately blasphemous young rascal, who was eliminated from Eton with the least possible disgrace, even as in later time he was expelled in an irregular way, and with no needless humiliation, from Oxford. And in consideration of this greater resemblance, the present writer has thought right to deal, in this chapter about the Brentford schoolboy, with the verses that, in Mrs. Shelley’s opinion and Lady Shelley’s opinion, are a faithful picture of the lad at Eton.

It is certain that the little Bysshe was an unhappy child at Sion House, even to the time of his withdrawal from the school, when he had grown almost too tall, though certainly not too robust, to be called ‘little.’ But miserable children are curiously, pathetically clever in escaping from their misery. The smart of them over, Bysshe soon dismissed from his mind those disagreeable visits to the Doctor’s study. In the pages of his ghost-stories and banditti-stories, his tales of satanic malice and knightly heroism, he forgot all about those very unkind boys. Most of those delightful books he borrowed from the circulating library, but doubtless he had in his schoolroom ‘locker’ his own copies of his favourite novels. It cannot be questioned he had a peculiar and inalienable copy of Zofloya, or The Moor, which, yielding flowers of romance to be found in the ineffably absurd novels which he published in the opening term of his literary career, gave him also fine pieces of descriptive writing that, after doing service in Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, were worked with skilful art into the lofty song of Laon and Cythna.

The urchin enjoyed his frequent walks under the playground’s southern wall with his cousin Tom Medwin, till the latter left Dr. Greenlaw’s sadly plebeian school, and went off to the public school which prepared him for Oxford. Though he cannot rely so confidently as he could wish on Tom Medwin’s assurance, the present writer likes to imagine Mr. Medwin had better ground than his treacherous memory for saying that, when they were schoolfellows at Sion House, he and his young cousin more than once played the truant; and rowing on the river more than once to Kew, went on one occasion by water to Richmond, where they visited the theatre and saw Mrs. Jordan in the ‘Country Girl.’ One would fain believe this of the little boy who, on growing to be a man, disliked the theatre almost as cordially as he had in former time hated Professor Sala’s dancing academy.

But one hesitates to trust in this matter to the biographer who seems to have erred in recording that Shelley acquired a taste for boating, even at a time considerably prior to the period in which this secret and lawless trip to the Richmond Theatre is said to have been made. Peacock, who can scarcely have been mistaken, was certain the poet’s ‘affection for boating began at a much later date’ than his time at Eton. Walter S. Halliday (Shelley’s friend at the public school) was no less certain, in February, 1857, that at Eton Shelley ‘never joined in the usual sports of the boys, and, what is remarkable, never went out in a boat on the river.’ Had Shelley enjoyed boating at Sion House, it is inconceivable that he (so passionately fond of the water in later time) would have avoided the river, or could have been kept from it at Eton. As Halliday was no such reliable authority as successive writers have thought, I should have hesitated to prefer his evidence to Medwin’s testimony on this point, had not the Etonian witness been so emphatically sustained by Love Peacock. In regard to what he says of Shelley’s boating at Brentford, Mr. Medwin professes to speak from his own knowledge. On the other hand, he acknowledges that, with respect to the poet’s alleged love of boating at Eton, he speaks on the worst possible authority—the poet’s own equally delusive and retentive memory. ‘He told me,’ says Medwin, vide The Life, v. I., p. 52, ‘the greatest delight he experienced at Eton was from boating, for which he had, as I have already mentioned, early acquired a taste.’ Such unsupported evidence from Shelley is scarcely anything better than no evidence at all, on being opposed by such witnesses as Halliday and Peacock.

From this chapter on Shelley’s school-days at Brentford, one should not omit a pleasant glimpse that is afforded of the boy (in the company of his cousins, the Groves, sons of Thomas Grove, of Fern House, Wiltshire, who married Charlotte Pilford, sister of the poet’s mother) by a letter, dated to Hogg, February 16th, 1857, by Charles Henry Grove. At that date it was in the memory of Charles Henry Grove how, when a tender Harrovian, ætat. nine, he saw his cousin Bysshe for the first time. On this occasion the nine-year old Harrovian, attended by his brother George, ætat. ten, and protected by a sufficient body-servant, picked Bysshe up at Brentford and carried him off, on the roof of the stage-coach to Wiltshire, for the Easter holidays. It lived in Charles Grove’s memory, how, during these holidays he and his brother joined Shelley in a feat of mischief that no doubt made the Squire of Fern wish them back at school. Acting on Bysshe’s suggestion, the three took the carpenter’s axes, and set to work cutting down some of the young fir-trees of Fern Park. As Charles Grove, ætat. nine at the time of this occurrence, was born in 1794 (vide Burke’s Landed Gentry), and Shelley was born in August, 1792, this pretty ‘piece of boys’ mischief’ may be assigned to the Easter holidays of Bysshe’s twelfth year,—i.e. Easter, 1804; about the middle of his whole time at Sion House.

It seems to have been towards the end of his time at Brentford, that Shelley experienced the delights of his tender attachment to the gentle schoolmate of his own age, with whom he used to hold romantic converse in the playground, and exchange ‘good-night kisses’ at the time for going to bed—the childish attachment so sweetly commemorated in the Essay on Friendship. What is the biographical value of that charming story, which one could believe no less readily than gladly, were it not told of Shelley by Shelley?

Had it proceeded from a man far less imaginative than Shelley, and far less prone to mistake the creations of his fancy for sincere recollections, no cautious reader would regard this pleasant record of infantile affection as faithful in every particular to the actual circumstances of the childish attachment. On the other hand, the coldest and most suspicious peruser will be disposed to think the story substantially truthful, due allowance being made for the force of imagination, the deceitfulness of the equally retentive and fallacious memory, and the peculiar infirmity of the man who could not be trusted to give twelve fairly consistent accounts of any matter, however much he might desire to be precisely accurate. It is in favour of this estimate of the story that the essayist’s portraiture of his former self harmonizes with the several other accounts he has given elsewhere of his character in childhood. In his later time Shelley always thought of the child, from which he had developed, as a mild-mannered, tractable, gentle child. The attachment being remembered, as an affair of his twelfth or thirteenth year, it may be presumed to have stirred and held his heart towards the close of his time at Brentford,—probably after Tom Medwin (who says nothing of the matter) left Sion House. To see the Brentford schoolboy’s prominent blue eyes overflowing with tears of delight, under the music of his friend’s voice, to watch the two urchins exchanging kisses, is to remember the girlishness of Byron’s early attachments, as well as the girlishness of his affectionate care for his Harrow ‘favourites.’ From his first to his last hour at Sion House the masculine forces of Bysshe’s two-sided nature were in abeyance. He was a gentle English girl rather than a gentle English boy.

CHAPTER V.

THE ETON SCHOOLBOY.

First year at Eton—Creation of the Castle-Goring Baronetcy—Sir Bysshe Shelley’s Last Will—Timothy Shelley’s Children—Miss Hellen Shelley’s Recollections—The Etonian at Home—The Big Tortoise—The Great Snake—Dr. Keate—Mr. Packe at fault—Walter Halliday—Mr. Hexter—Mr. Bethell—Fagging—Mad Shelley—‘Old Walker’—Enthusiasm for Natural Science—The Rebel of the School—Lord High Atheist—Dr. Lind’s Pernicious Influence on Shelley—Poetical Fictions about Dr. Lind—Shelley’s Illness at Field Place—His Monstrous Hallucination touching his Father—John Shelley the Lunatic—Zastrozzi—Premature Withdrawal from Eton.

Respecting the year of Shelley’s first term at Eton, the authorities differ: one set of writers averring that he entered the school in his fourteenth year (1806), whilst other biographers record that he entered it in his fifteenth year (1807). Lady Shelley says, ‘At the age of thirteen Shelley went to Eton.’ On the other hand, the usually exact Thomas Love Peacock says, ‘On leaving this academy’ (i.e. Sion House) ‘he was sent in his fifteenth year to Eton,’ and Mr. William Rossetti says, ‘He passed to Eton in his fifteenth year.’ Though no prudent writer ventures to set aside lightly a date given by so careful and conscientious a biographer as the author of the Memoir of Shelley, I venture to think that Mr. Rossetti is at fault in this particular, having perhaps erred through reasonable reliance on the accuracy of Mr. Peacock, who seems, in taking a date from one of the books he was reviewing for Fraser’s Magazine (June, 1858), to have gone a barley-corn beyond Mr. Middleton’s words. Instead of saying that Shelley went to Eton in his fifteenth year for the first time, Mr. Middleton (in his Shelley and his Writings, 1858) keeps to historic truth in merely stating, ‘In 1807, when Shelley was in his fifteenth year, we find him at Eton.’ He neither says nor implies that the future poet could not have been found there in the previous year. On the contrary, his words indicate uncertainty as to the precise date of the poet’s first appearance at the school. Gaining his knowledge of the poet’s career at Eton from old Etonians who were schoolmates there, Mr. Middleton was probably instructed in this matter by an old Etonian who, whilst certain Shelley was at the school in 1807, could not speak positively to his being there in an earlier year.

Though the author of the Shelley Memorials is curiously deficient in the communicativeness and accuracy to be looked for in a biographer professing to gather her materials ‘from Authentic Sources,’ it may be assumed that Lady Shelley is right on a matter from which the schoolboy’s preserved letters and his father’s domestic memoranda of the year 1806 would save her from going wrong. It favours this view of Lady Shelley’s statement, that old Mr. Bysshe Shelley was created a baronet by the Duke of Norfolk’s influence on the 3rd of March, 1806, when he was in his seventy-fifth year. At length the Castle-Goring Shelleys had risen from the status of prosperous middle-class folk to the honour of the baronetage. Having become a dignified commoner, with a dignity transmissible to his descendants, the Horsham miser (who had sent his son to Oxford) naturally felt that, instead of associating any longer with tradesmen’s sons at Sion House, his grandson (the heir of the heir to the Castle-Goring baronetcy) should make the acquaintance of the sons of the nobility and other territorial gentry. Much though he grudged the fees for his baronetcy, and dreaded the school-bills, Sir Bysshe determined that his grandson should be educated up to his rank, and sent forthwith to Eton.

The future poet was still under Dr. Greenlaw’s government, and his grandsire was counting the days still to elapse before he should clutch the long-coveted honour of the bloody hand, when the veteran took an important step (on 28th November, 1805) for the achievement of the grand ambition of his riper age and failing years. This ambition was to make the Shelleys of his loins into the House of the Castle-Goring Shelleys, and to endow the new house with a large and strictly entailed estate in land, that should place it securely amongst the great territorial families of Sussex; a common-place ambition, that was the natural and matter-of-course ambition for a man of old Bysshe Shelley’s character, career, and age. As he was his father’s eldest son, Mr. Timothy Shelley (the poet’s father) naturally approved this design for making a big entailed estate, to which he would succeed on his sire’s death. Though they squabbled and wrangled with one another on minor pecuniary questions, the veteran and his son were of one mind on this point. Whilst the old man was set on making a big entailed estate, his son was of opinion that the estate ought to be made.

The materials of which it was proposed to construct this big estate were,—

(A) Certain real estate, settled by deed of appointment (dated 20th August, 1791) on Mr. Bysshe Shelley for life, and then on his son Timothy for life, with, &c.

(B) Certain other real estate, settled, by certain indentures of Lease and Release (dated respectively 29th and 30th April, 1782) on the same Bysshe Shelley for life, and then on his same son Timothy for life, with, &c., and

(C) Certain unsettled lands, the property and disposal of which were wholly in the same Bysshe Shelley: and one half of the same Bysshe Shelley’s personal estate.

After what has been said of old Bysshe Shelley’s success in making money, it is needless to inform readers that C was by far the most important of these three several lots of estate:—that, though of considerable value, A and B were insignificant in comparison with C.

What was the precise yearly revenue of A and B does not appear. At a time when he had no clear knowledge of the matter, the poet used to speak of the revenue as 6000l. per annum. But whilst he certainly did not understate the income, there is reason for thinking he greatly exaggerated it. The rental may (for all I know positively to the contrary) have been 6000l. a-year; but in estimating the poet’s financial position, readers had better assume that the yearly income from A and B did not exceed, and may have been considerably less than, 4000l. a-year. If the two lots of estate yielded a clear income of 4000l. they were worth about 80,000l. If they yielded as much as 6000l., they were worth about 120,000l.

Under the settlements, to which reference has been made, Percy Bysshe Shelley (the poet) was, in the language of lawyers, tenant in tail male of A and B in remainder expectant on the deaths of his father and grandfather. That is to say, the fee simple of A and B would devolve on him absolutely after the deaths of his sire and grandsire. For the more clear information of non-legal readers, let it also be observed that, having this estate in A and B under existing settlements, Percy had in A and B an interest that would vest in him at the attainment of his majority,—an estate which, on his coming of age, he would be able to charge, aliene, or will away from his kindred; an estate on which he would be able to borrow money, and could sell, or dispose of by testament, during the lives of his father and grandfather, or the life of either of them, no less than when on the deaths of both of them he should come in actual possession of the land.

This being so, old Bysshe Shelley (son of the Yankee apothecary) made a will on 28th November, 1805, whereby he devised his unsettled lands (of C) to trustees, In Trust to settle the same, in what lawyers designate ‘strict settlement,’ on his son Timothy Shelley for life, Percy Bysshe Shelley for life, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sons successively, according to their seniorities in tail male, and then in default, &c., on other sons of Timothy Shelley aforesaid born in the testator’s lifetime and their sons successively in tail male, and then in default, &c., on other sons of the same Timothy, born after the testator’s death, successively according to their seniorities in tail male; with similar limitations in default, &c., in favour of John Shelley Sidney, and Robert Shelley (Timothy’s younger brothers by half-blood), and their respective issue male. By his will the testator further bequeathed his personal estate to trustees, and directed half of it to be invested in land, to be settled in the same way as the already-mentioned lands. It is further directed by the will that all persons entitled to A shall concur in settling A as C, or forfeit for themselves and issue all the interest pertaining to them under the will in C. By the will, therefore, Percy Bysshe Shelley stood to succeed on his father’s death as tenant for life to the whole entailed estate, provided he concurred in arrangements whereby the real estate A (of which he was tenant in tail male in remainder expectant on the deaths, &c., &c.) would become part of the entailed estate. To take his place in succession to the very large estate, to be created by his grandsire’s will, he was only required, on coming of age, to surrender his eventual absolute interest in a comparatively small estate, and take in lieu thereof a life-interest. Nothing was required of him that is not often required of heirs under similar circumstances. Nothing was required of him that (in case of his death in his nonage) would not have been required of his younger brother, or any other person similarly interested in A. Such was the will of old Bysshe Shelley made in 1805 in abundant grand-paternal affection for the poet, long before any differences touching religion and politics had risen between the youngster and his father. This same will was in due course proved as the last testament of Sir Bysshe Shelley, Bart., in Doctors’ Commons, in 1815.

At the moment of the future poet’s departure for Eton, it is well to remind the readers of his story, that he was the eldest child of his parents,—being senior to his eldest sister by a year and nine months. Mistakes having been made about the poet in his earlier years, which would not have been made by his biographers, had they been aware of this fact, it is necessary to warn readers not to mistrust their present guide because he differs on this matter from several previous authorities. Here is the list of the offspring of Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, with some particulars of the children, taken from the pedigree, mentioned in a previous chapter:—

1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, eldest son and heir-apparent, born at Field Place 4th August, 1792, baptized at Warnham 7th September following.

2. Elizabeth Shelley, eldest daughter, born 10th May, 1794, baptized at Warnham 2nd July following.

3. Hellen Shelley, 2nd daughter, born 29th January, 1796, baptized 27th February following; died an infant, buried at Warnham 25th May, 1796.

4. Mary Shelley, 3rd daughter, born 9th June, 1797, baptized at Warnham 17th of July following.

5. Hellen Shelley, 4th daughter, born 26th September, 1799, baptized at Warnham 6th October following.

6. Margaret Shelley, 5th daughter, born 20th of January, 1801, baptized at Warnham 12th March following.

7. John Shelley, 2nd son, born 15th of March, 1806, baptized at Warnham 14th of August following.

A child of six years, when her brother went to Eton for the first time, Miss Hellen Shelley (who lived to be in her later middle age the chief source of information respecting his boyhood) may have still been in her seventh year, cannot have exceeded her seventh year by three full months, when he returned from Eton to Field Place for his first Etonian holidays. It follows that, instead of pertaining to an earlier period of his boyhood, Miss Hellen Shelley’s recollections of her brother relate to the Eton schoolboy; to the youth between the date of his gentle extrusion from Eton and entrance into Oxford, to the University undergraduate, and to the youthful lodger in Poland Street, immediately after his by no means undeserved expulsion from his Oxford college. It is not in the nature of things that his sister Hellen (his junior by seven years and something more than seven weeks) should have remembered aught of her brother previous to his Eton time, so clearly as she remembered the things narrated of him, by virtue of her own memory, in the letters of her pen published in Hogg’s first volume. It follows, therefore, that for a biographer to make the Shelley of the Warnham day-school, and the Brentford boarding-school, out of these reminiscences, is to produce a precocious infant very much unlike what the schoolboy can have been in his earlier childhood; in fact, to set the reader wrong at the story’s outset with a false Shelley, instead of the real Shelley.

If Miss Hellen Shelley may be trusted (and there is no reason to question the general fidelity of the lady’s reminiscences), the Etonian, at home for the holidays, taught his little sisters to personate angels of light and angels of darkness, spirits of the air and spirits of the fiery depths, with such eccentric and fantastic articles of clothing or other drapery as the children of big country-houses can usually discover in out-of-the-way wardrobes and closets when they have mind to ‘play at dressing up’ in the Christmas holidays. He used also to play under their curious eyes, and to their alternate delight and terror, with his chemical toys and electrical apparatus. Good cause had little Hellen to hold her breath with alarm, and wonder what would come of the magical performance, when the mysteriously clever and daring Bysshe was seen running through a principal passage of the old home towards the kitchen, whilst bearing in his outstretched hands a dish, that sent blue flames upwards even to the ceiling. Better reason still had the small damsel to cry aloud, in strains that brought the elders of the family to her rescue, when the scientific experimentalist (who had on previous occasions inspired her with a reasonable aversion to his electrical jar) declared his humane purpose of curing her chilblains with a series of small shocks.

Himself a glutton of horrible tales, the Etonian-at-home was ever ready with a harrowing narrative of tragic crime and ghastly consequences, when the girls begged him to tell them something terrible, by the flickering light of their play-room fire. He overflowed, also, with stories about the alchemist, Cornelius Agrippa, who was represented as living up aloft in a spacious garret, under the roof of Field Place, directly over the heads of the excited children, grouped about this playroom’s only source of light. To their frequent entreaties for a personal introduction to the mysterious and benevolent Cornelius, Percy used to assure his sisters that in due course they should see the philosopher, his books, his lamp, his venerable beard, when he should migrate from the garret to the cave, soon to be dug for him in the orchard, and furnished with all the apparatus needful for his investigations and experiments.

At other times Percy entertained his sisters with anecdotes of the Great Tortoise, that had lived for centuries and grown to enormous magnitude in and near Warnham Pond. What he told them of the fabulous tortoise does not appear. It is so difficult to get anything but turtle-soup and hair-combs out of a tortoise of any kind, one would like to know how the boy contrived to inspire his auditors with a vivid interest in this creature of his imagination. To do so he may be presumed to have talked freely and with wild disregard for the teaching of the best authorities on natural history.

Towards the close of his Eton time (or possibly somewhat later, between his withdrawal from Eton and departure for Oxford) Percy Bysshe discarded the Big Tortoise and replaced it with the Great Snake, that was supposed to have lived for three hundred years in the Field Place gardens, before it was killed by the scythe of the careless or ruthless gardener, during the childhood of its imaginative historian. Biographers, who smile at the Shelleyan girls for putting faith in their brother’s taradiddles about the Big Tortoise, are firm believers in his taradiddles about the monstrous and Venerable Serpent. Indeed, they are apt to be indignant with flippant sceptics, who declare themselves as ready to believe in the Warnham Tortoise as in the Field Place Snake. How the snake had amused itself for three hundred years in the grass and flower-beds of the garden is not on the record. Nor does it appear how the young historian came upon the evidence of its longevity.

At Oxford, Hogg heard strange tales of the Field Place Snake; and listening to them, as they came from his young friend’s lips, the hard-headed north-countryman may well have wondered why his young friend told so many more lies than were necessary. But if Hogg dismissed the Great Snake legends from his mind, as mere levities undeserving of remembrance, some of the poet’s historians would have them treated more respectfully. Believing in the Great Snake, and gushing over it in a style that appears slightly comical to unbelievers, Mr. Buxton Forman ejaculates, ‘We think of these things, and remember the anecdote of the “great old snake” of Field Place, beloved of the little Percy, and killed by the scythe of the gardener, and almost wonder what inarticulate dirge the little boy uttered over his mutilated favourite’!!! It still remains for a Royal Academician to put on canvas this pathetic scene:—The Child Shelley uttering an inarticulate dirge over the corse of his mutilated favourite, whilst the remorseless and all unfeeling gardener pursues his daily wages with the fatal knife.

Other facts touching the Etonian may be gleaned from Miss Hellen Shelley’s letters, or the pages of less delightful writers. Sometimes he is seen taking his sisters for country walks. At other times he is seen on his pony, riding, perhaps, to ‘the meet’ of his grandsire’s hounds; for much as he loved money, and much as he may have grudged the cost of his kennel, old Sir Bysshe kept hounds, and a huntsman and ‘whips’ almost to the last. There were times when he walked forth shooting, with a gun in his hand and a dog at his heels. On one occasion the humour seized him to don the garb of a farmer’s hind, and bearing a truss of hay on his back walk across the Field Place lawn, and under the very windows through which his sisters were looking. It was, doubtless, some two years or more before this bit of rural masquerading, that he used to walk out in the evening, to look at the moon and stars, moving to and fro in the park, and in the Warnham lanes, with the butler at his heels, to watch over him and take care of him. There was also a day, when this—in his sisters’ eyes, so marvellous—Etonian spoke to them seriously of his intention to buy a little gipsy-girl, and train her to love him and depend upon him. But nothing in all Miss Hellen Shelley’s reminiscences is more eloquent of the pride she took in her marvellous brother, than her recollection of the pleasure she took in admiring ‘the beautifully fitting silk pantaloons,’ and other sumptuous raiment he was allowed to order ‘according to his own fancy at Eton.’ Little Hellen’s delight was perfect when she saw this exemplary Etonian standing, after the fashion of men and boys, with his back to the fire, posturing, and playing with his coat-tails, so as to display his slight figure and exquisite nether-garments to the best advantage. What though this superb brother now and then stained his little sister’s pinafores and frocks with lunar-caustic, and otherwise injured them with the chemicals he used in his scientific experiments?

Going to Eton in 1806 (probably in the early autumn) Shelley left the school in disgrace, some time towards the close of 1809. The exact date of his withdrawal from the college has never been revealed by the authorities of Field Place, who have been no less reticent respecting the circumstances that resulted in his premature removal from the seminary, where he failed to win the approval of the masters, though he succeeded eventually in making himself acceptable to the boys. Why Lady Shelley, writing ‘from authentic sources,’ was thus silent on particulars of no slight moment, the present writer makes no suggestion. All he can say positively on these points is that Shelley left the school in disgrace, which there is reason for thinking he richly merited, and left it at the time already stated. His Eton career, therefore, cannot have exceeded three years by very many weeks. In so short a time, however, he endured more suffering than falls to the lot of an ordinary schoolboy, and at the same time achieved a reputation that long survived his departure from the school, and would have lived for several years in its traditions, even if his subsequent career had not given his former comrades at the famous seat of learning, other and stronger reasons for holding him in remembrance.

On the girlish side of his nature, Bysshe was no boy to conciliate the riotous, overbearing urchins of the public school. When the masculine elements of his constitution came to be in the ascendant, he made enemies of the masters; and at Eton, in ‘old Keate’s time,’ to have a bad character with the masters was to come under the lash of a gentleman who surpassed Mulcaster and Busby as a severe disciplinarian. If any kind of posthumous renown is better than none, this gentleman may be numbered amongst the fortunate members of his profession; for his fame will not perish so long as Orbilius is remembered. Shelley soon learnt that Dr. Greenlaw’s hand was light in comparison with the hand of the Etonian master-in-chief; that his rods were feathers in comparison with the implements of torture wielded by Dr. Keate. Succeeding a head-master, the mildness of whose rigour had rendered him the scorn of pedagogues and the jest of schoolboys, Dr. Keate ascended his throne with a purpose of restoring the discipline of the school to the ancient standard of Etonian severity. Just the man to accomplish this ambition, he failed only by raising the discipline something higher than the standard he proposed to his energies. It is recorded of this squat, stout, thickset, crooked-legged man, that a look of cruel glee played over his countenance as he conned the names of a heavy flogging-bill. A man of humour and a lover of good cheer, he was a hospitable entertainer; and it has been told admiringly of him, how he would leave his guests over their wine, and half-an-hour later return to them with heightened gaiety after flogging a batch of gentlemanly young culprits. If he has not been strangely maligned by history and tradition, he used to stand for the hour together over the penal block with his right shoulder well thrown back, and his right arm moving like a piece of machinery. He is said to have flogged eighty boys on a single morning, throwing his whole force into every stripe, smiling grimly as he went on in the path of duty, and finally retiring to his breakfast with an air of serene complacence pervading the visage, that bore so striking a resemblance to the visage of a bull-dog. Prominence is here given to these matters out of deference to those of the Shelleyan enthusiasts who, like Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley, insist that harsh and ferocious schoolmasters are to be held accountable for whatever was slightly amiss in the poet, before he shone forth a faultless creature.

Arising in no way from deficiency of materials, which, save in respect to one or two matters, are superabundant for the biographer’s purpose, the chief difficulty in describing Shelley’s course at Eton is the difficulty of discriminating between the trustworthy and delusive materials, and especially of separating the threads of pure fact from the threads of pure fiction used in about equal proportion in the manufacture of statements that, without the exercise of cautious and nice discernment, might be accepted as wholly true or altogether devoid of evidential value. For instance, in dealing with the statements by Mr. Packe, touching Shelley’s career at Eton—statements to which Lady Shelley accords her unqualified credence and conclusive ‘imprimatur’—it is by no means easy to separate the threads of truth from the threads of fable.

‘Among my latest recollections of Shelley’s life at Eton,’ says Mr. Packe, at the end of his letter, ‘is the publication of Zastrozzi, for which, I think, he received 40l. With part of the proceeds he gave a most magnificent banquet to eight of his friends, among whom I was included.’

In these few words there are three mis-statements. As Shelley left Eton in the later part of 1809, and Zastrozzi was not published before the 5th of June (or, at the earliest, before the end of May), 1810, it is certain that the publication of the novel was no incident of Shelley’s life at the school. It being certain that Shelley received never a farthing of publisher’s money for the absurd performance, Mr. Packe must have been wrong in saying the author was paid 40l. for it. [Mr. Packe’s words, ‘for which, I think, he received 40l.,’ are, of course, to be read ‘for which he received, I think, 40l.’—i.e. as the statement of a witness, certain that a considerable sum was paid, though uncertain whether 40l. was the precise sum.] As the author received no money for the book, he cannot have given ‘with part of the proceeds’ (i.e. part of nothing) ‘a most magnificent banquet to eight of his friends.’ But though he gives three pieces of delusive evidence in three lines of type, it does not follow that the lines are of no evidential value. An honest person, writing in good faith, Mr. Packe may be fairly regarded as a person, remembering something about Zastrozzi in connexion with Eton (where the novel, or some part of it, was certainly written); with remembering something, also, of Shelley’s farewell feast to a party of friends at Eton; with remembering, moreover (or, at least, believing that he remembered), that Shelley was said to have been paid 40l., more or less, for the literary production. These recollections (albeit the recollections of a very mistaken and very much misinformed witness) are not to be rejected as altogether valueless, but kept in reserve as honest statements and possibly veritable recollections, unfit to be used as testimony by themselves, but quite fit to be used in confirmation of similar recollections by other people. Could it be shown in like way that each of the other guests, either at the time of the banquet or some time afterwards, was under the impression that the feast was paid for with publisher’s money, no person competent to sift and weigh evidence would hesitate in coming to the conclusion that the banquet was given by Shelley as a thing bought with money he had received from a publisher,—that the common impression of the eight independent witnesses was the result of representations made by the giver of the feast.

But what was Lady Shelley about, when she—drawing her information from ‘authentic sources,’ and proclaiming the superiority of her book to all Shelleyan biographies from ‘unauthentic sources’—allowed the three lines of Mr. Packe’s letter, and other equally faulty lines of it, to go before the public as sure and trustworthy information? If biographies from ‘authentic sources’ are made up in this fashion, readers may with reason come to prefer biographies ‘from unauthentic sources.’ As Lady Shelley has forced her literary method and address into contrast with those of the man of letters, whom she discharged with strange discourtesy, she must not resent the assurance that the comparison she has provoked is not to Mr. Hogg’s disadvantage.

In the sufficient evidences respecting Shelley at Eton, critical readers make the acquaintance of two very different Shelleys:—the girlish Shelley (of Mr. Walter Halliday’s letter) who ‘was not made to endure the rough and boisterous pastime at Eton,’ never ‘joined in the usual sports of the boys, and, what is remarkable, never went out in a boat on the river,’ but preferred to ramble about Clewer, Frogmore, and Stoke Park, by himself, or with a single companion of congenial gentleness; and the combative Shelley, whose unruliness and contumacious behaviour to his masters gained for him the office and title of ‘The Atheist’ of the school. Differing little from the moping and discontented lad of his last year at Sion House, the girlish Etonian exhibits several points of resemblance to Byron in the earlier part of his unhappy time at Harrow; and in like manner when he has risen to be the arch-rebel of the school, the saucy and combative Etonian reminds one of the combative Byron, leading the riotous Harrovians, and rising with atheistical impudence against Dr. Butler’s authority.

In one respect Shelley entered Eton under circumstances far more advantageous than those that caused Byron to hate his public school in the opening terms of his connexion with it. Unlike Byron, who went to Harrow, so badly prepared for its studies, that, had it not been for Dr. Drury’s sympathetic consideration, he would have been put (to his poignant humiliation) in a form of quite little boys, much younger than himself, Shelley went to his public school well grounded in Latin and Greek. ‘He had,’ says Medwin, ‘been so well grounded in the classics, that it required little labour for him to get up his daily lessons.’ Medwin’s testimony on this point is sustained by the evidence of Messrs. Packe and Halliday, two of the poet’s contemporaries at Eton.

During his stay at the public school, Shelley seems to have resided successively at two different houses. Getting his information from old Etonians, who had known the author of Laon and Cythna at Eton, Mr. Middleton certifies that the future poet boarded, in 1807, at the house of Mr. Hexter, the writing-master, ‘one of those extra masters, some of whom resided at the College, and, holding an amphibious rank between the tutor and the dame, were allowed to take boarders.’ Subsequently he is found in the house of Mr. Bethell, the tutor whom Mr. Packe (possibly with no more justice than generosity) described half-a-century later as ‘one of the dullest men in the establishment.’ What Mr. Packe’s qualifications were for passing judgment in this style on one of his former preceptors does not appear; but the solitary epistle, which gives him a place in these pages, would not warrant a confident opinion that brightness was Mr. Packe’s distinguishing characteristic. Fortunately, for school-masters, evidence given to their discredit by former pupils is never regarded as evidence of the highest quality by persons of discretion and judicial fairness. Possibly Mr. Packe was as wrong about Mr. Bethell’s intellect, as he was about the date of the publication of Zastrozzi. But an idle word to the defamation of the Eton tutor, with whom Shelley came into conflict, was no word for Lady Shelley to withhold from the world. It has long been the practice of the Shelleyan enthusiasts to think and speak the worst of every one with whom the poet had a difference,—to blacken every reputation that could be suspected of lowering the lustre of the poet, who under auspicious circumstances ‘might have been “the Saviour of the World.”’

That Shelley, on the girlish side of his nature, was no boy ‘to take kindly to fagging,’ and on the masculine side of his nature was precisely the boy to detest a system under which he might be licked with a bamboo or a leather strap for hard-boiling an egg which he had been told to boil lightly, no one is likely to question. But though it is certain he disliked being made to fag, and more than probable that he showed this dislike in ways to be resented, not only by the proprietors of fags, but also by the most infantile of Etonian conservatives, readers are under no obligation to accept for truth all the fine and melodramatic accounts of the efforts made, and sufferings endured by the poet, in order to put an end to so revolting a system of domestic tyranny.

Getting her fanciful notions of the matter from her husband’s lips, Mrs. Shelley would have us believe that repugnance to fagging was the offence which brought him so often to the block, and rendered him alike unpopular with masters and boys. It is even averred that to put down fagging he organized a conspiracy of the junior Etonians against the barbarous practice. That no such conspiracy was begotten and fostered by Shelley is certain; for the old Etonians, of whom Medwin and Middleton certainly (Peacock and Hogg almost certainly) made inquiries about the matter, had never heard anything of a movement which could not have failed to come to their knowledge, had it ever been an incident of scholastic politics in their time. The truth underlying these fictions is that Shelley, like most junior boys, conceived a hatred of ‘fagging,’ suffered much from it, and having, unlike most junior boys, the rashness to declare the hatred, paid the penalty of his rashness, in being cuffed, licked, and silenced in various painful and exasperating ways. This seems to be the whole of the case, which he magnified in later time into a far greater affair. To Peacock, he used to speak of the cruelties practised upon him by senior boys at Eton, with a show of abhorrence only surpassed by his display of indignation and disgust at the monstrous barbarities done him by Lord Chancellor Eldon. In still later time he doubtless spoke even more passionately to his wife of the fires of Etonian persecution. Men sometimes say strange things to their wives; and, in certain moods, wives are even quicker to believe the strange things, than in other moods to suspect untruth in the commonplace things told them by their lords. After brooding for twelve years or more over the sorrows and wrongs he endured at Eton, the poet believed all he imagined about them.

Though Shelley suffered no little at Eton from ‘fagging,’ he suffered far more from the particular bullying that flourishes under the system he detested, quite as much as in schools where fags are unknown, and senior boys have no especial and peculiar slaves. In behalf of ‘fagging’ it is justly urged that if the master licks his ‘fag,’ he is quick on the score of dignity and ownership to protect him from maltreatment by other senior boys;—that if the ‘fag’ is bullied by his proper lord, he is secured by ‘the system’ from being bullied by a score of tyrants. None the less true is it that, though the system saves a junior boy from the tyranny of several tyrants acting individually and separately, it is powerless to guard him from the oppression of many tyrants acting conjointly and in mass. Subject to the certain tyranny (more or less severe and irritating) of a single despot, the fag is also liable to the uncertain tyranny of the playground (i.e., of the multitude of his schoolmates, acting in unison), a tyranny which his peculiar owner can do little or nothing to moderate. In his earlier time at Eton, Shelley suffered more than most boys of his age from the tyranny of the playground.

Boys are quick to discover the peculiarities of their companions, and no less quick to discover something offensive in those peculiarities. Having discovered the offensiveness, they conceive themselves morally entitled—and, indeed, by honour bound—to chastise the individual who by force of his disagreeable peculiarities offends them. Of all peculiarities likely to offend a multitude of schoolboys and set them at war with a junior boy, none is more certain to give offence than a ‘general queerness,’ allied with unsociability. The shy, nervous, moping boy from Field Place had not been a week at Eton before he was found guilty of ‘general queerness.’ He had not been there a month before he was found guilty of unsociability. These facts having been found against the boy who held aloof from other boys, the playground began to ridicule him, hoot at him, mob him. Under these provocations the nervous and excitable boy vented his rage with shrill screams of fury. Obviously, the boy who responded in this violent style was a boy worth the trouble of ‘baiting.’ It was good fun to hem him in, mimic his cries of rage, point derisive fingers at him, and burst into clamorous laughter, when he uttered a more than ordinarily shrill shriek of rage and anguish. When he clenched his fist, and rushed at the nearest of his tormentors with the intention of striking him, the playground fled before him—not in real terror, as Lady Shelley imagines—but with a mere show of fright simulated for his further annoyance, the promotion of general hilarity, and the maintenance of ‘sport.’

It was the practice of Etonians, in Shelley’s earlier time, to assemble on dark winter evenings under the cloisters, and amuse themselves in this droll fashion. The name of a particular boy (one known probably to be in the rear of the multitude coming from the playing-grounds) was shouted aloud, as though he were needed for some urgent business. The cry having been thus raised, it grew louder and louder from the increasing energy and growing number of the voices. On the appearance of the boy owning the name, the clamour was redoubled. Everyone drew to one side or the other to make a way for him. It was useless for him to proclaim his presence and beg the shouters to spare their lungs. No words of his utterance could be heard in the uproar. Could they have been heard, any words from him would only stimulate the shouters to shout yet louder. There was no course open to him but to walk straight on through two lines of excited faces to the point, where the demand for his presence had originated. On coming to that point he found (if he did not know it before) that nobody wanted him, and was received with peals of laughter. In its origin the game was doubtless a lively, piquant, and comparatively inoffensive practical joke at the expense of a lad, who, imagining himself called for some serious cause, hastened at full speed to discover he had been summoned for nothing. But it is in the nature of practical jokes to degenerate into cruel jokes, however amiable they may have been in the first instance. As soon as this particular joke had lost its newness, the boy thus shouted for knew that he was being made a fool of, felt himself insulted, grew angry; his anger being further stimulated by some new variation of the game of torture.

It having been discovered that Shelley suffered keenly from the ridicule of the playing-fields, he was selected evening after evening for this particular ‘baiting.’ Evening after evening the cry was raised of ‘Shelley, Shelley, Shelley!’ As he ran the gauntlet of derisive faces and voices, fingers were pointed at him. Not seldom he came in for rougher usage. If he was carrying books under his arm, a blow from behind scattered them on the ground. His clothes were pulled and torn. More than once a muddy football, deriving its impetus from a well-planted kick, came with the force of a spent shot down the narrow alley of deriders, caught him in his shirt-front, and bounding upwards, made his face as dirty as his frill. Mr. Middleton was assured by an eye-witness of these scenes that the fury, to which Shelley was goaded by his tormentors, ‘made his eyes flash like a tiger’s, his cheeks grow pale as death, his limbs quiver, and his hair stand on end.’ It is probable that the boy’s shrill screeches of rage, wild gesticulations, and frantic appearance, whilst he was thus baited and ridiculed by the whole school, first suggested to his persecutors that ‘mad’ was the fittest epithet to put before his surname. Anyhow, he was known in the school as ‘Mad Shelley,’ both before and after he had earned the less opprobrious designation of ‘The Atheist.’

At a time when ‘Mad Shelley’ was the butt of the playing-grounds, Eton was visited by an itinerant lecturer, who received permission to deliver a course of lectures on astronomy, chemistry, electricity, and mechanics, to the boys of the school. Familiarly designated ‘Old Walker,’ this vagrant professor used to go about the country with his assistant-demonstrator, orrery, solar microscope, electrical machine, and other scientific apparatus; lecturing at the superior boys’ schools and girls’ schools of the provincial towns. Without Medwin’s testimony to the point, it would have been safe to assume that the wandering lecturer, who was permitted to enlighten the boys of the most aristocratic of our great public schools, had also the honour of rendering the same service to the boys of Dr. Greenlaw’s academy. Medwin, however, speaks so precisely of the visit Old Walker paid Sion House during Bysshe’s second or third year at the school, and of the lively interest taken by Shelley in the professor’s demonstrations, that he is not, in consideration of his frequent inaccuracies, to be declared guilty of error on the main facts of this part of his narrative. It is, of course, conceivable that blundering Tom Medwin assigned to the great room of the Brentford Academy incidents of a later date and another scene. But it is more probable he was guiltless of the mistake. Anyhow, Shelley had not long suffered under imputations of madness at Eton, when he heard Old Walker’s course of lectures for the second time, if Medwin was right—for the first time, if Medwin was wrong in the matter.

At Eton, ‘Old Walker’ had an eager devourer of his words, a delighted witness of his experimental demonstrations, in Mad Shelley. The lectures had on Shelley all the effect they were designed to produce on intelligent lads. Producing on him all the effect desired by the Professor, they were also fruitful of results, that in the opinion of the Eton masters far exceeded the limits of wholesome interest. It is conceivable that, had Dr. Keate, and Mr. Bethell, and Mr. Hexter, known how the boy would be stirred and excited by the lectures, Old Walker would not have received permission to deliver them to the collegians, or Mad Shelley would not have been allowed to be present at their delivery. Like many other boys before and after his time, Mad Shelley was so taken by the lectures, that it is only a permissible figure of speech to say, he ‘went mad’ on natural science. Before Old Walker cleared out of Eton, the boy had become the owner of a solar microscope, and bought an electrical machine of Old Walker’s assistant.

In Mr. Hexter’s house the boy (ætat. thirteen and fourteen) had shown more concern for English literature than for any other accessible means of pastime,—reading works of prose (as he had done at Brentford), learning by rote passages from the English poets, and composing childish dramas with the assistance of a fellow-pupil and fellow-fag of the same house, named Amos; amusing himself, in short, in accordance with his genuine and strongest intellectual taste and ambition. One of the happiest and most agreeable glimpses to be had of Mad Shelley in his earlier time of Eton, affords a view of the boy, running nimbly up and down the stairs of Mr. Hexter’s house, and singing out cheerily the witches’ song of Macbeth:—

‘Double, double, toil and trouble:
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’

Of the plays composed by the two boys nothing is known at the present date, save that they were performed by the author before a third fag of their house, Matthews, who was the solitary witness of the performances, and, it may be hoped, an enthusiastically applausive one.

In the new excitement and interests, to which Old Walker’s lectures gave birth, Shelley’s care for English literature languished. Like other children he cared only for the new toy. Like other boys possessed by the scientific mania, he for a while delighted in nothing but his scientific apparatus, contrivances, experiments. For a time it was true that he cared for no learning that his masters taught. During this passion for the experimental study of scientific phenomena, one of his exploits was to lay a long train of gunpowder between a decaying tree and a point, at some distance from the tree, and then to fire the gunpowder by means of a burning-glass,—with a result altogether satisfactory to the youthful experimentalist,—but less satisfactory to the owner of the ancient tree, and by no means to the approval of the masters, who were responsible for the behaviour of the boys, and for the safety of the buildings of Eton College. On another occasion, after his transference from Mr. Hexter’s house to the house of the gentleman described by Mr. Packe as ‘one of the dullest men of the establishment,’ he was busy at dead of night in his bedroom with his ‘chemical studies’ (as they are grandly styled by the Shelleyan enthusiasts), when he upset a frying-pan full of ingredients into the fire, with consequences that roused all the sleepers in the house, and made them in the morning congratulate themselves on not having been burnt to death in their beds by Mad Shelley.

It certainly does not sustain Mr. Packe’s contemptuous opinion of the tutor, that Mr. Bethell was bright enough to think he had better check his pupil’s enthusiasm for scientific inquiry. It can scarcely be regarded as evidence of his dullness that this gentleman felt it his duty to see what Mad Shelley was after, and take steps to preserve his house and its inmates from the quick destruction, with which they were threatened by the rather lawless proceedings of an eccentric boy. With this purpose in view, Mr. Bethell paid Shelley’s room a visit at a moment, when the young gentleman was then and there enlarging his knowledge of nature, by the scientific production of a blue flame, though the boys of Mr. Bethell’s house had been forbidden to produce blue or any other flame in their bedrooms.

‘Chemical experiments,’ airily remarks Lady Shelley, who, taking the story from the page of a previous writer, seems to think it even more to her father-in-law’s credit than to the tutor’s manifest shame, ‘were prohibited in the boys’ chambers; and the tutor (Mr. Bethel) somewhat angrily asked what the lad was doing. Shelley jocularly replied that he was raising the devil. Mr. Bethel seized hold of a mysterious implement on the table, and in an instant was thrown against the wall, having grasped a highly charged electrical machine. Of course the young experimentalist paid dearly for this unfortunate occurrence.’

And equally, of course, he deserved to pay dearly for the ‘unfortunate occurrence.’

Positively this story is told in proof that young Bysshe Shelley was a youth of parts, genius, and exceeding sweetness of disposition. A boy (probably fifteen years old, possibly a year older by this time) is caught in his bedroom doing what he has been forbidden to do. Coming upon the boy when he is so occupied, his tutor says, somewhat angrily, ‘What are you doing?’ Instead of answering this by no means impertinent question in the respectful tone required by mere good breeding, the boy answers ‘cheekily’ (the Shelleyan enthusiasts must pardon me for using a schoolboy’s word, to describe the schoolboy’s misdemeanour), ‘I am raising the devil.’ On seeing his tutor approach a powerfully charged electric battery, with outstretched hand, instead of crying out ‘Don’t touch it, sir; it will do you injury,’ the boy (‘the young experimentalist!’), holding his tongue, allows his tutor to touch the machine, and to be thrown violently against a wall. Lady Shelley would have us think this ‘young experimentalist’ a nice, loyal, fine-natured, gentlemanly boy; would have us join in a shout of derision at ‘one of the dullest men of the establishment;’ would have us think this pleasant boy badly treated, because he was whipt for his misbehaviour. I cannot do as Lady Shelley would have me. On the contrary, knowing the temper and gracious qualities of public schoolboys, I have no doubt they will, for the most and best part, concur with me in saying, that Shelley (superb poet though he became in later time) behaved badly in this business, and deserved all that he ‘caught’ from Dr. Keate for unruliness, so wholly ‘out of form.’

Shelley having caused so much trouble with his experimental excesses, it was decided that, to prevent them from turning their bedrooms into laboratories and setting fire to rotten timber, the boys should at least for awhile be forbidden to play at being chemical students. A book on chemistry, which Shelley had borrowed of Mr. Medwin, the Horsham attorney (Tom Medwin’s father), being found in the lad’s room, it was sent by his tutor to Mr. Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, who passed the volume on to its owner, saying in a note (referred to in the younger Medwin’s Life of Shelley), ‘I have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton.’ As chemistry, thus forbidden in 1808, cannot be supposed to have been forbidden in the school when Old Walker was permitted to make the boys take an interest in the science, it is a fair inference that the prohibition resulted in some degree from annoyances, coming to the school through the lecturer’s most interested auditor. Mad Shelley’s electrical machine, and other scientific apparatus, would probably have been sent to Field Place, together with the volume on chemistry, had he not already deposited them for safe keeping in the hands of a certain white-headed gentleman, who will soon receive the attention he merits at the hands of the present writer.

Those who knew Shelley best in his boyhood did not imagine at the time, that the ‘prohibition of chemistry’ would dispose him to desist from the forbidden pastime. Those who knew him best in later time concurred in thinking that the order to refrain from chemical inquiry and experiments would only quicken his enthusiasm for the proscribed amusement.

‘Might not this extraordinary prohibition,’ asks Mr. Medwin, speaking from his personal knowledge of his cousin in boyhood and manhood, ‘have the more stimulated Shelley to engage in the pursuit?’ In the same spirit, Mr. Rossetti remarks, with equal sagacity and justice. ‘No doubt the great turn for chemical experiment which he developed at Eton, and which became his chief passion there, had as much to do with an impressible fancy, and with the fact that chemical practice was prohibited to the schoolboys in their chambers, as with scientific tendencies.’

It is certain, that instead of having any natural aptitude for the practice, Shelley was unusually deficient in the qualities, requisite in a scientific experimentalist. A dreamer, a visionary, and an enthusiast, he wanted the nice touch, the fine perception of minute phenomena, the intellectual patience, the mental disposition for accuracy in the smallest details. It is certain that the man, who, even in his proper art, was curiously careless of verbal details, never had any sincere disposition for pursuits, in which nothing can be done without incessant attention to minutiæ,—for pursuits which repel the student, who does not delight in the painful vigilance and methodical exactness of scientific inquiry. Had he played with the microscope to the last hour of a long life, as he played with it fitfully for several years after leaving Eton, he would never for a single hour have been ‘a worker’ with it. He was singularly wanting in what Mr. Rossetti calls ‘scientific tendencies.’

On the other hand, it is no less manifest that in his earlier time a certain mental and moral perversity—a perversity by no means uncommon in young people, and only a few degrees less common in persons of mature age—gave him a keen appetite for fruit he was forbidden to pluck, and a distaste for whatever fruit he was required to enjoy. The majority of boys take to smoking (a very disagreeable pastime to beginners), even as Thomas Carlyle confessed he took to it,—‘for the pure sin of it.’ Just as the Chelsea sage began smoking because he was ordered not to smoke, the Etonian Shelley pursued chemistry because he was ordered not to pursue it. Had it not been for the needful prohibition of the pastime, that threw the school into disorder and threatened boarding-houses with destruction, the enthusiasm for science, for which Old Walker’s lectures were in the first instance accountable, would soon have died out. Forbidden to play with his chemical apparatus and munitions, Shelley cared for no other pastime, and maintained that the pastime was a serious pursuit. Had the authorities of the school ordered every boy to study chemistry and astronomy, and put their ban on the pursuit of classical lore, Shelley would soon have declared natural science a profitless kind of busy idleness, and would have ‘wrought linked-armour for his soul’ out of Latin and Greek books. This perversity must be borne in mind by those who would take a true view of the Shelley of later times,—the Shelley who at Oxford soon ceased to care for the ‘experimental studies’ in which he was at liberty to waste his whole time, and cared especially for the sceptical writers whom he was admonished to avoid; the Shelley who, on coming from the university into the wider world, threw himself into the arms of the revolutionary doctrinaires (before he had given three weeks to the study of political science), because his natural advisers,—the persons with the strongest title to direct him authoritatively,—bade and entreated him to give no heed to such dangerous teachers.

Having come into conflict with the Eton masters on the blue-flame question, and the natural right of every Eton boy to possess an electrical machine and use it at his pleasure for the humiliation of his tutor, Shelley was nearing the time when the unanimous voice of the forms (minus the masters) proclaimed him ‘The Atheist’ of the school. Under the persecutions of the playground, which had goaded him out of his girlishness into thought and action, that revealed the masculine forces of his nature, Shelley was ceasing to be the Sion House ‘faint heart’ and ‘milksop,’ when Old Walker visited Eton. In the subsequent battle for freedom of scientific inquiry, the boy’s combativeness became daily more and more apparent; his carelessness for his own skin and his contempt for Dr. Keate’s rods more and more sublime, till Mad Shelley, ceasing to be everybody’s butt, became a boy of pluck and merit to the whole school,—a possible martyr in the sacred cause of scholastic disorder,—a lad who cared not a fig for Keate or any of Keate’s underlings. From the mad-dog of the Eton playing-grounds, he had risen to the proud position of The Eton Atheist. The girlish Shelley had for the moment become ‘a boy,’—a very naughty boy!

Let there be no misunderstanding about this rather sensational title. A boy might be The Eton Atheist, and at the same time be a sound and unwavering believer in every doctrine of the Thirty-nine Articles. The gods of Eton were only the masters of the school; the sceptics of Eton were nothing more terrible than those naughty boys who held these masters full cheap, and questioned their natural fitness for the authority given into their hands. The Atheist of Eton was the boy who surpassed all the other naughty boys in contempt for the masters, and not content with questioning their natural fitness for their official eminence, boldly and utterly denied it. No Etonian sceptic could question, no Etonian Atheist could deny the existence of gods who daily entered boys’ names on flogging-bills. Dr. Keate’s rods were no things to be ignored; the wielder of those rods was a person, whose existence could not be questioned. His character, however, was open to criticism, and the Lord High Atheist spoke his mind about it with freedom.

Before an Etonian could rise to the position of Lord High Atheist, or even become a candidate for the office, it was needful for him to distinguish himself from ordinary deriders of the pedagogic species by some super-puerile extravagance of audacity. The youngster, who preceded Shelley in the Atheist’s chair, had one dark winter’s night taken possession of the huge, richly-gilded bunch of grapes, which hung in front of ‘The Christopher Tavern,’ and having so taken into his keeping the inn-sign, suspended it over the door of the head-master’s house. In the morning, on rushing over his threshold to get to chapel in time for sacred service, this head-master ran full butt into the bunch of grapes, with consequences altogether satisfactory to the contriver and doer of the practical joke, who witnessed the successful issue of his arrangements from a convenient corner. It is needless to say that, after executing this feat in contempt of the greatest of the Etonian gods, the borrower of the grapes was declared Lord High Atheist before he had lived another day. It is uncertain what egregious act of profanity raised Shelley to the same eminence. Possibly the affair with the electric battery, that hurled Mr. Bethell against the bedroom wall, may have contributed to the future poet’s elevation to an office, which he does not seem to have disgraced. Anyhow, it is certain that Shelley became the Lord High Atheist of the school, and that he would not have attained to this distinction, had he not been regarded by his comrades as the most unruly and impudent boy of the establishment.

Whilst holding this office, not content with deriding the masters and disobeying their orders at every turn, the boy also distinguished himself by the fervour and blasphemous ingenuity with which he used to curse the King (George the Third), and used also to curse his own father. It speaks ill for the tone of Etonian manners during the poet’s time at the public school, that the boys used to gather round the Lord High Atheist on a hint that he meant forthwith to curse his own father. The willing listeners never seem to have expressed disgust at the comminatory performance. On the contrary, the frequently repeated entertainment was thought so droll and piquant that, during his short stay at Oxford, Shelley was entreated, at least on one occasion, to curse his father yet again for the gratification of two or three of his former schoolfellows. Hogg, who was present on this occasion, records that Shelley yielded reluctantly to the entreaty; but he did consent to the importunity of the old Etonians, and ‘delivered with vehemence and animation a string of execrations, greatly resembling in its absurdity a papal anathema.’ Though he joined in the ‘hearty laugh,’ that rewarded the performer, Hogg, on the departure of the two or three Etonians, exclaimed, ‘Why, you young reprobate, who in the world taught you to curse your father,—your own father?’—an inquiry to which Shelley replied:—

‘My grandfather, Sir Bysshe, partly; but principally my friend, Dr. Lind, at Eton. When anything goes wrong at Field Place, my father does nothing but swear all day long afterwards. Whenever I have gone with my father to visit Sir Bysshe, he always received him with a tremendous oath, and continued to heap curses upon his head so long as he remained in the room.’

Ever ready, though he was, to give evidence to his father’s discredit, the undergraduate did not venture to charge his father with retorting Sir Bysshe’s maledictions. Whilst Mr. Timothy Shelley appears only to have sworn after a bad fashion of the period, the first baronet of Castle Goring exceeded the licence of blasphemy accorded to gentlemen by a custom, more honoured in the breach than the observance.

It remains to be seen how the Shelleyan enthusiasts will deal with the record of Shelley’s habit of cursing his father, when the public shall have been educated to approve every act of the poet’s life; but at present they glide lightly over the ugly business in memoirs for the general reader, glossing it with suggestions of wilful misstatement or unconscious exaggeration on the part of the poet’s earliest biographer. Even Mr. Forman forbears to hint that Shelley’s resemblance to the Saviour of the World is heightened by the poet’s behaviour to his father. In the coteries, however, where the Shelleyan apologists speak with less caution, these cursing bouts are sometimes referred to for evidence that, even in his boyhood, the author of Laon and Cythna was a person of infinite jest and subtle humour. These apologists must bear with a writer who sees much to condemn, and nothing to admire, in such exhibitions of unfilial rancour and profanity. There are jokes and jokes;—those that can be enjoyed, those that can be tolerated, and those that are absolutely intolerable. The joke of a boy cursing his own father for the amusement of his schoolfellows is one of the intolerable kind. The reader may be safely left to select a fitter word than ‘humourist’ for the designation of the young gentleman, who amused himself and his friends in so revolting a manner.

Mr. Walter S. Halliday, by the way, must have forgotten all about these cursing-bouts, when he wrote to Lady Shelley, ‘He’ (i.e., the poet at Eton) ‘had great moral courage and feared nothing, but what was base, false, and low.’ Surely it is base and low for a boy to curse his own father for the pure fun of the thing.

Who was Dr. James Lind, chiefly famous (and infamous) as Shelley’s chief instructor in the science and art of cursing? Drawing her facts from ‘authentic sources,’ Lady Shelley speaks of him as ‘an erudite scholar and amiable old man, much devoted to chemistry, at whose house Shelley passed the happiest of his Eton hours.’ ‘He was a physician,’ the lady adds, ‘and also one of the tutors.’ Recording that Dr. James Lind bore ‘a name well known among the professors of medical science,’ Mrs. Shelley has also put it on record that ‘the Doctor often stood by to befriend and support the persecuted, and that her husband never, in after-life, mentioned his name without love and reverence.’ Shelley himself used to say of this amiable and erudite old man, ‘He loved me, and I shall never forget our long talks, where he breathed the spirit of the kindest tolerance and the purest wisdom.’ Without alleging that he speaks from other and better authorities than the poet, his widow and his daughter-in-law, Mr. Rossetti says of Shelley and his peculiar patron, ‘The only official person whom he really liked there’ (i.e. Eton) ‘was Dr. James Lind of Windsor, a physician, chemist, and tutor, and a man of erudition, who superintended the youth’s scientific studies.’ Had he only deserved half the praise lavished upon him, Dr. Lind would have been a man of extraordinary goodness. But, unfortunately, it is only too clear that he was a mischievous, malignant, hard-swearing old man, who gained great influence over the Etonian Shelley, and used it hurtfully.

Possibly Lady Shelley and later biographers were justified in writing of this bad old man, as though he held a tutorial office on the Eton establishment; but without being in a position to speak positively to their discredit, the present writer ventures to entertain a doubt of their accuracy on this matter, and to give Dr. James Lind the full benefit of the doubt. If the Doctor was one of the Eton tutors, he was even a worse man than he is declared in these pages; for in that case the man, who encouraged Shelley to study chemistry in defiance of the recent prohibition, and to persist in his contumacy to the masters of the school, was guilty of encouraging the boy to rebel against authority, which he was bound by honour and official obligations to maintain. The grey-headed tutor, who secretly stimulated the boy’s rebellious spirit, and applauded him for it, was wanting in loyalty, and not guiltless of treachery, to his comrades in tutorial service. But in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, it may be assumed that the amiable and extremely benevolent old gentleman, who taught a fifteen-or sixteen-years-old boy to curse his father, was under no especial obligation to have a care for the lad’s moral health, apart from the general duty of every man to encourage what is virtuous, and discountenance what is vicious in all persons, over whom he has any influence.

If Mrs. Shelley was right in saying Dr. James Lind made himself famous among the professors of medical science, it is strange that the fame at this date rests chiefly on the lady’s certificate. Though he has inquired of the persons most likely to have heard of Dr. Lind’s services to science, the present writer has learnt nothing of the deeds from which so bright a fame should have proceeded.

All that is known with certainty at this present date about this amiable and benevolent old man, apart from his pernicious intimacy with the young Etonian, is that during Shelley’s time he was a medical practitioner (certainly no physician of the London College) following his vocation at Windsor, that he had for his housekeeper a Miss Lind (his daughter or sister), that he was a hard swearer, and that, conceiving himself to have been badly treated by George the Third, he used to make much of his grievance, and waste many words and much time in cursing the King who had done him evil. What the man’s grievance was, that made him think so ill of poor old George the Third, is wholly a matter for conjecture. The Doctor may have been employed for awhile at ‘the Castle,’ and been superseded by a younger doctor. He may have failed in some candidature for a medical office within the royal borough, and discovered grounds for attributing his misadventure to the influence of the Castle. The grievance may have been a real one, or an affair of the imagination. All that can be told of the matter, in this year of grace, is that the Doctor believed himself to have been ‘infamously treated’ by the King, and that, in a manner scarcely accordant with all that has been written of his amiability and benevolence, seldom allowed a day to pass without doing his best to consign his royal enemy to the lowest and darkest pit of perdition.

The Lord High Atheist of the Etonians used to join Dr. and Miss Lind over their tea-table twice or thrice a-week, and after the meal spend in their society those happy hours (mentioned by Lady Shelley) during which he learnt how to curse his father more strenuously by hearing the Doctor curse his King. The Shelleyan enthusiasts are sometimes heard to suggest that Hogg may have made too much of what Shelley told him about the physician’s comminatory taste and achievements. But there is no evidence that Hogg was guilty of the exaggeration. Nor is there any reason to suppose Shelley was more than just to his teacher’s consummate mastery of malediction. Yet it was of this Doctor, who swore so heavily over his willow-pattern tea-cups, whose swearing was so inexpressibly piquant to its youthful auditor, that Shelley wrote some eight years later in Laon and Cythna, as though the man of oaths and imprecations were chiefly remarkable for philosophic dignity, sweetness of speech, mildness of manners. It was of his intercourse with this embittered and scurrilous apothecary, that the poet wrote in Prince Athanase with equal melody and falseness:—

‘Prince Athanase had one belovèd friend,
An old, old man, with hair of silver white,
And lips where heavenly smiles would hang and blend
With his wise words;
********
Such was Zonoras; and as daylight finds
One amaranth glittering on the path of frost,
When autumn nights have nipt all weaker kinds,
Thus through his age, dark, cold, and tempest-tost,
Shone truth upon Zonoras; and he filled
From fountains pure, nigh overgrown and lost,
The spirit of Prince Athanase, a child,
With soul-sustaining songs of ancient lore
And philosophic wisdom, clear and mild.
And sweet and subtle talk now evermore,
The pupil and the master shared; until,
Sharing that undiminishable store,
The youth, as shadows on a grassy hill
Outrun the winds that chase them, soon outran
His teacher, and did teach with native skill
Strange truths and new to that experienced man;
Still they were friends, as few have ever been
Who mark the extremes of life’s discordant span.’

It was to this amiable and wise physician that Shelley was indebted for another practice, scarcely less hurtful to his moral character, and far more fruitful to him of disaster at the outset of life, than his revolting habit of cursing his own father. Not content with teaching him to curse his parent, Dr. Lind taught the boy it was good fun to inveigle unwary people into scientific controversies, to trip them up with catch-questions, and then to laugh at them for being fools. By this mild-natured and benevolent physician (who is usually described as satisfying the boy’s hunger for wholesome knowledge, and ministering to his spiritual needs) Shelley, whilst at Eton, was taught to write letters under assumed names to persons interested in, but only slightly acquainted with, chemistry,—in order to discover their ignorance, and then have the pleasure of laughing insolently at it. The letters written for this amiable purpose (under Dr. Lind’s instruction) were for the most part written deceitfully,—i.e. with a false show of being written by a young and ingenuous inquirer after truth, and with a false name and address. Can any diversion be imagined more likely to infuse a boy with self-conceit and arrogance, to inspire him with the temper most foreign to genuine love of knowledge, and giving him a taste for underhand trickery, to train him how to indulge it habitually? Yet the good and wise Dr. Lind taught the boy to amuse himself in this ungenerous and deceitful way. By-and-bye, the disastrous consequences of this practice on the boy’s career at Oxford will be seen. That Shelley on coming to Oxford was so disputatious, so overflowing with scorn for minds he deemed weaker than his own, so ungenerously eager to prove himself wiser than his teachers, so ungenerously quick to show people they were fools, and mock them for being fools, must be attributed in a great degree to his premature introduction (by the humane and judicious Dr. Lind) to the violent delights of controversy. One of the correspondents, whom the boy thus lured into profitless disputation, is said to have threatened him with a flogging from Dr. Keate; a threat that is said to have determined the Etonian henceforth to approach strangers under cover of a false name and address. Had the threat been carried out and the flogging given, the boy would have taken no more than he deserved for his bad manners.

To Dr. Lind the poet was also indebted for his earliest lessons in Free Thought on matters pertaining to religion. Hogg is a good authority for this statement. Having thus sown the seeds of religious scepticism in the mind of his young friend, this exemplary physician left them to grow in a congenial soil. It does not appear that the doctor ever troubled himself to observe the consequences of his action in this matter, after his pupil left Eton. Nor does it appear that, after leaving Eton, Shelley ever troubled himself to visit, or correspond with, the virtuous sage to whom he declared himself so deeply indebted. For good or evil it cannot be questioned the boy of tender age was influenced in no slight degree by the tutor who educated him to write false epistles, to curse his father, and to repudiate Christianity.

On finding themselves disposed to regard the ‘egotisms’ of the Shelleyan poems as passages of veracious autobiography, readers should correct the tendency to error by remembering, how the hard-swearing Windsor doctor was idealized into the virtuous hermit of Laon and Cythna and the no less virtuous philosopher of Prince Athanase; how the boy (the poet’s former self), who delighted in the doctor’s profane and scurrilous utterances, was idealized into the young Prince whose heart harboured ‘nought of ill,’ whose ‘gentle, yet aspiring mind,’ was alike remarkable for justice, innocence, and various learning; and how, in course of time, the poet believed so completely all his fanciful pen had written to the Doctor’s honour, that he used to speak of him as an example of wise, stately, and virtuous old age. According to words, spoken by the poet to his second wife, Dr. Lind’s benevolence and dignified demeanour were qualified by youthful ardour. His locks were white, his eyes glowed with supernatural expressiveness, his countenance and mien were eloquent of amiability. ‘I owe to that man,’ Shelley used to ejaculate, ‘far, ah! far more than I owe to my father; he loved me, and I never shall forget our long talks, when he breathed the kindest toleration and the purest wisdom.’

In this strain Shelley used to talk of the man who taught him to curse his own father,—of the man whom he would have remembered only as a profane old reprobate, had he been less completely the victim of his own delusive fancy.

It has already been told how Shelley spent his Eton holidays at Field Place; how he took his sisters for walks, entertained them with his scientific toys, amused them with romantic stories, and dazzled them with his Eton air and stylish clothing; and how he strolled forth by starlight and moonlight to gaze at the heavenly bodies. But precise mention has still to be made of an incident of the Etonian’s life under his father’s roof, to which readers may well give their best attention.

At a time when Dr. Lind’s pernicious influence over him was at its height, Shelley suffered at Field Place from a febrile attack attended with delirium,—the illness of which he spoke to William Godwin’s daughter, before her elopement with him, in these words—

‘Once when I was very ill during the holidays, as I was recovering from a fever which had attacked my brain, a servant overheard my father consult about sending me to a private madhouse. I was a favourite among all our servants, so this fellow came and told me as I lay sick in bed. My horror was beyond words, and I might soon have been mad indeed, if they had proceeded in their iniquitous plan. I had one hope. I was master of three pounds of money, and, with the servant’s help, I contrived to send an express to Dr. Lind. He came, and I never shall forget his manner on that occasion. His profession gave him authority; his love for me ardour. He dared my father to execute his purpose, and his menaces had the desired effect.’

These words were spoken by Shelley to Mary Godwin on the ‘night that’ (to use her own words) ‘decided her destiny; when he opened at first with the confidence of friendship, and then with the ardour of love, his whole heart to me.’ Mrs. Shelley is at great pains to impress her readers with a sense of the precise accuracy of her report of the words, which, it is suggested, determined her, or at least were largely influential, in determining her, to fly with the object of such atrocious paternal malignity. The substantial accuracy of the lady’s report is put out of question by Hogg, who declares that he heard ‘Shelley speak of his fever and this scene at Field Place more than once, in nearly the same terms as Mrs. Shelley adopts.’ It appears, therefore, that, whilst the accuracy of Mrs. Shelley’s report is unquestionable, the statement made to her by her husband is one of the few statements respecting himself, which he repeated at different times with no important variation; the substantial consistency of his several accounts being evidential at least of the earnestness with which he pondered the narrative, and in some degree of the sincerity of his avowals of its truthfulness.

Like so many of the poet’s stories about himself, it was a curious mixture of fact and fiction. As the story, so thoroughly believed and steadily repeated by its teller, points to the period when Shelley began to regard his father with morbid fear and aversion, and also to the circumstances that gave birth to so unnatural a state of feeling, it is well to inquire how much of this marvellous story was true, and how much of it was illusion. No discreet and judicial hearer of the story ever gave the slightest credit to the chief and most painful statements of the narrative,—viz., that Mr. Timothy Shelley intended to send his fever-stricken boy to a madhouse, and had been heard to express this intention. The evidence being conclusive that he was an affectionate father and kindly gentleman, the notion that he was capable of any such atrocity can have been nothing more than one of the sick boy’s delirious fancies. Had Mr. Timothy Shelley been a less amiable person, his abundant sensitiveness for the honour of Field Place (the honour of the newly-created Castle Goring family), and his nervous care for the world’s opinion, would have saved him from the blunder of sending the sick boy to a lunatic asylum; the blunder, moreover, of consigning to a madhouse the son who, as a lunatic, could not have concurred in the resettlement of family estates, for which his concurrence was requisite, and the Squire was greatly desirous. Old Sir Bysshe was not more desirous than his son Timothy for the resettlement of the estates A and B. A man of affairs, Mr. Timothy Shelley, would have known that, whilst imprisoned as a lunatic, his son could not resettle the estates; knew also that, by barbarously throwing him into a madhouse, he would create in his son’s mind a state of feeling that would be fatal to the scheme for getting him to join in the resettlement, on his liberation or escape from the madhouse. Had he been morally capable of so atrocious an offence, self-interest would have preserved the Squire of Field Place from the iniquitous purpose, about which Shelley’s wild story made him gossip lightly and loudly. Hogg gave not a moment’s credence to the ghastly and revolting particulars of the story. The other hearers of the story, to whom Hogg makes reference, concurred with him in ascribing these particulars to hallucination, which continued to prey on the patient’s light and flighty brain, long years after his recovery from the fever that gave birth to the morbid fancy. Even Lady Shelley seems to take the only sensible view of this part of the affair, though she does not go the length of saying her father-in-law was the victim of hallucination—

‘From the indiscreet gossip,’ she says, ‘of a servant, who had overheard some conversation between his father and the village doctor, Bysshe had come to the conviction that it was intended to remove him from the house to some distant asylum:—’

language certainly implying that the sick boy’s fancy was erroneous. Hogg says:—

‘It appeared to myself and to others also, that his, i.e. Shelley’s recollections, were those of a person not quite recovered from a fever, which had attacked his brain, and still disturbed by the horrors of the disease. Truth and justice demand that no event of his life should be kept back, but that all materials for the formation of a correct judgment should be freely given.’

Other particulars of the story may have been no less baseless. That a servant told him of his father’s purpose, that he gave this servant orders and means to despatch a messenger to Dr. Lind, may have been mere fancies of the delirious brain. On the other hand, Lady Shelley may have had better authority than the poet’s words for attributing the painful conviction to a servant’s gossip. It can also be readily imagined that the sufferer from the distressing fancy gave his pocket-money to a servant, and bade him be off to Windsor for the doctor. These are points on which the reader may be left to form his own opinion, but he must altogether acquit Mr. Timothy Shelley of intending to send his boy to a madhouse.

The indisputable facts of the story are these:—The boy had a febrile illness attended with delirium; whilst ill he suffered from a fancy that his father meant to send him to a lunatic asylum; after this notion had fastened on the disordered brain, Dr. Lind was sent for; in compliance with the summons Dr. Lind came from Windsor to Field Place, and attended the boy till he was better. A reasonable view of these facts is that during his delirious sickness the patient expressed a strong desire to see Dr. Lind, and that, in their natural desire to do the best for their child’s comfort and recovery, Mr. and Mrs. Shelley invited the doctor to come to Field Place. Even Dr. Lind with all his eccentricity would not have presumed to visit Field Place without an invitation from the master of the house. Still less would he have ventured to force his way into the sick chamber against Mr. Timothy Shelley’s wish. The statement that he dared Mr. Shelley ‘to execute his purpose,’ and brought him to a sense of decency by ‘menaces,’ is simply ridiculous. Ever reluctant though she is to discredit any of the poet’s statements, Lady Shelley shows her opinion of the wildest extravagances of his marvellous story by being silent about them.

Something should be said about the probable time of this illness. Circumstances point to the latter part of 1808 as the period in which Dr. Lind attended Shelley in Field Place. Shelley may have been right in regarding the illness as an incident of one of his ‘holidays;’ but there are grounds for thinking it more probable that the illness ran its course during one of the Eton terms. Four-and-thirty years after the poet’s death, Miss Margaret Shelley could remember that, whilst her sister Hellen was at school at Clapham, Bysshe was sent home from Eton to be nursed through an illness.

‘I went to school before Margaret,’ Miss Hellen Shelley wrote in 1856, ‘so that she recollects how Bysshe came home in the midst of the half-year to be nursed; and when he was allowed to leave the house, he came to the dining-room window, and kissed her through the pane of glass.’

Hellen’s age (she was born in 1799) seems to indicate that this illness cannot have taken place earlier than the autumn of 1808. Even then she would have been young to go to boarding-school. If this was the illness mentioned in the poet’s strange story, Dr. Lind’s visit to Field Place is a simple affair. Sent home when he was already sickening for an illness, the patient had been under Dr. Lind’s medical treatment before he was sent home to be nursed through an illness that would probably prove a severe one. What more natural and in the ordinary course of things, when the boy grew worse, and the village apothecary wished for ‘a second opinion,’ than for Mr. Timothy Shelley to summon the Windsor doctor who had seen the patient in the earliest stage of the malady. The conversation between Mr. Timothy Shelley and the village apothecary, which is said to have been so indiscreetly reported to the sick boy, may have turned wholly on the question, whether Dr. Lind should be sent for. Dr. Lind unquestionably was summoned; and as Mr. Shelley was at Field Place at the time, no one else is likely to have dispatched the summons. Had he imagined Dr. Lind had already been, or would soon be, the boy’s instructor in hard swearing, Mr. Shelley would, doubtless, have sent for another doctor. As the future poet left Eton towards the end of 1809; as the illness of the marvellous story occurred during the height of Dr. Lind’s influence over the boy; as that influence was certainly an affair of the later half of Bysshe’s stay at Eton (1808-9); and as Shelley was certainly sent home from Eton to be nursed through an illness when his sister Hellen (born in September, 1799) was already at school and in ‘the middle of her half-year,’ most readers will concur with the present writer in thinking the illness mentioned in the story and the illness mentioned in the letter were one and the same illness,—and that the illness at the earliest took place in the autumn of 1808, at the latest in the spring of 1809, i.e. when Shelley was sixteen years old. If this manner of dealing with sure facts is acceptable to readers, they may congratulate themselves on having discovered the six months, at the beginning or end of which, the poet was first possessed by the fancy that his father was looking out for a pretext for locking him up in a madhouse:—the hideous fancy that (to use Love Peacock’s words) ‘haunted him throughout life.’

How came this ghastly and absolutely groundless fancy to take this early and enduring hold of his mind? The answer must be sought in the poet’s ancestral story, the characteristics of the romantic literature of which he had been a greedy devourer from his early childhood, and the conditions of his life at Eton. The answer to be extorted from these three sources of information is doubtless an answer, resting on inference and conjecture from facts, almost as much as upon facts themselves. Still it is an answer worth having, though veined with uncertainties. The Shelleys, who eventually blossomed into the Castle Goring house, resembled the eighteenth and nineteenth century Byrons in having a distinct strain of madness. Mention has already been made of the Newark apothecary’s elder brother, whose story is told in the following words of the Castle Goring pedigree:—

‘John Shelley, of Fen Place, aforesaid, esq., 2nd son, a lunatic. Bapt. at Worth 1st September, 1696; died unmarried at Uckfield, 7th October, 1772, buried at Worth 18th same month.’

This long-lived lunatic, who did not escape from his dismal doom in this world, till he had entered his seventy-seventh year, is a significant feature of the poet’s ancestral story. Brother of the Newark apothecary, this madman, whose affliction caused him to be set aside in the arrangements of the family (to his younger brother’s advantage), was the first baronet’s uncle, the poet’s great-great-uncle. The obscurity of the families, with whom this lunatic’s ancestors intermarried before his period, precludes the discovery of the number of the various channels through which insanity may have come to his brain. But it is not to the physiological credit of the Castle Goring Shelleys, that their ancestors married so many heiresses. Families, whose men have married for money in successive generations, are usually seen to suffer in bodily stamina and mental health from what has come together with money to the family story. There is, of course, no reason why an heiress should not be as healthy as a poor parson’s daughter. But there is nothing in money to exempt its possessor from struma in its various forms; and so long as he can win in his bride the first object of his desire, money, the male fortune-hunter is apt to shut his eyes to the indications that the advantages of the money must be taken with serious attendant drawbacks. Families, famous for marrying heiresses, whether they intermarry with noble stocks, or, like our poet’s ancestors, with mere gentle yeomanry (i.e. squireens entitled to bear arms), are seldom famous for the qualities that render individuals gracious and existence delightful. If they endure for centuries, such families often do so by suffering for centuries.

To account for the same revolting fancy, allowance must also be made for the morbid literature on which the boy had been mentally suckled from his tender infancy,—the tales of domestic horror and cruelties, in which he had revelled from early childhood. To the producers and readers of that literature, no character was more attractive than a wretched being unjustly dealt with as a lunatic by barbarous relations. It is at least probable that the stories of such cruelty, flowing as they did from the press in the period when Monk Lewis threw the audience of a crowded theatre into hysterical anguish by his monodrama of The Captive, may have inspired the boy with a morbid apprehension of life-long imprisonment in a mad-house.

Even more likely to produce the same agonizing apprehension, were some of the more painful incidents of his life at Eton, if their terrorizing power was intensified by the knowledge that one of his not very remote collateral ancestors had been confined justly or unjustly as a lunatic. The nervous boy who was hunted and baited in the Eton playing-grounds, by a multitude of lads, shouting at the top of their voices, ‘Mad Shelley, Mad Shelley, Mad Shelley!’ had good reason to suspect that something in his behaviour and idiosyncrasy must have suggested the imputation of insanity.

‘I have seen him,’ says one of the spectators of these frequent scenes of cruelty and suffering, ‘surrounded, hooted, baited like a maddened bull; and, at this distance of time (forty years after), I seem to hear ringing in my ears the cry which Shelley was wont to utter in his paroxysms of revengeful anger.’

The torture, which made so deep and enduring an impression on the boy who only witnessed it, affected far more strongly the boy who was the object of the persecution. To the end of his life, the poet (given like Byron to brood over the sorrows of his childhood) used to speak with passionate resentment of the barbarous malice of the boys, who either exasperated him with an accusation they knew to be groundless, or, worse still (if they really thought him insane), mocked him for the affliction that entitled him to their compassion.

In his later time at Eton, when he was distinguishing himself by contumacy and insolence to the masters of his school, his father was of course informed of his insubordination and other scholastic offences. Could his word be taken (which it may not be) on the matter, Shelley was twice expelled from Eton, and twice (at his father’s entreaty) re-admitted to the school, before he was dismissed from it for the third and last time. It cannot be doubted the Atheist of College gave the masters good reasons for wishing him away from the school, and for requesting Mr. Shelley to remove him from an establishment that, fruitless of benefit to him, suffered not a little from his disorderliness. It is probable that the Squire of Field Place was aware of the maledictions poured upon him by the Etonian scapegrace. It is unlikely that the boy, so unruly and contumacious at school, was submissive and respectful to his father in the holidays. There is no evidence before the world that the lad received personal chastisement at his father’s hands. But it is conceivable he was so corrected by the Member for New Shoreham, in days when fathers of unimpeachable humanity and affectionateness applied the bamboo and the birch to their sons in a way, that would now-a-days be justly stigmatized as barbarous and revolting. It is, however, certain that the essentially amiable, though rather choleric, squire, had much trouble to manage his heir, and that their inharmonious intercourse was attended with friction and collisions, that could not fail to make such a son regard his sire with suspicion and aversion. If he was familiar with the story of the Uckfield lunatic, either from the gossip of old servants, or from the free speech of that lunatic’s nephew (old Sir Bysshe), what more likely and natural than for the Etonian scapegrace to think that his fate might resemble his great-great-uncle’s fate,—that he might be set aside as a lunatic to his little brother’s advantage in the arrangements of his family,—that his father was already looking about for a pretext and an occasion for sending him to a mad-house?

But, it may be asked, was Peacock justified in going so far as to say of the poet, that ‘the idea, that his father was continually on the watch for a pretext to lock him up, haunted him through life?’ Was the delusion so absolutely unintermitting? Were there no times when the hideous fancy passed from his brain? No lucid intervals when he saw he had in this matter been the dupe of his own imagination? No times, moreover, when he forced himself back into the delusion by an effort of will and fancy, similar to those imaginative exercises in which Byron was so expert and curious an operator? In answer to these questions, it can only be said that there is no evidence of intermissions in the delusion, and that Peacock probably intended to say no more when he remarked that the morbid fancy, which certainly held the poet’s mind in his later time, ‘haunted him through life.’

To the present writer, indeed, it is conceivable that there were times when the poet’s mind got the better of the most hideous of the several delusions that troubled it from time to time. The present writer can also conceive there were times when the poet, by the exercise of his will, sustained his belief in the delusion, even as the dreamer can for a few seconds by pure volition persist in believing a dream, which may be described as overlying his consciousness of its unreality. One of the prime dogmas of the school of metaphysicians, whose tenets Shelley embraced with cordial conviction of their truth, is that belief is independent of volition. The dogma is true in respect to perfectly logical and altogether sound minds. But there are unsound minds that are capable of shaping their opinions and determining their belief by processes of volition. Minds subject to manifest and distressing illusions are not to be rated as perfectly logical and altogether sound. Shelley’s mind certainly was liable to such delusions. It is conceivable he would not have insisted on the separateness of belief and volition with so much needless emphasis and passion, had he not been uneasily conscious,—troubled and irritated by a criminatory sub-consciousness—that in some matters (such for instance as his delusion respecting his father) he believed what he ought not to believe, and could by strenuous volition save himself from believing. Some such thought as this was perhaps in Peacock’s mind, when he spoke of the ‘semi-delusions’ of the man whom he loved so heartily.

Returning to Eton after recovering from the fever, of which so much has been said in foregoing pages of this chapter, Shelley, to the end of his time at the public school, continued to be in most respects the same boy he was on rising to the office of Lord High Atheist. Persisting in contumacy and unruliness he left the school in disgrace, though not under any ignominy to preclude him from the advantages of further education at one of the universities. In one particular, however, he seems to have changed his course towards the close of his Etonian career. The passion for scientific amusements (let them not be called ‘studies’) having in some degree spent itself, he devoted the greater part of his leisure to literary exercise, in the hope of winning premature distinction as a man of letters,—an ambition he certainly would not have entertained, had he been so seriously set on scientific inquiry, and occupied with scientific interests, as successive biographers have represented.

On 7th May of 1809, whilst still a boarder in Mr. Bethell’s house, Shelley wrote Messrs. Longman & Co., the eminent publishers of Paternoster Row, London, a boyish letter, informing them that he was writing a romance, and expressing his wish for them to publish it. The publishers were informed that, as he was ‘the heir of a gentleman of large fortune in the county of Sussex,’ their correspondent was not writing for money, though he would gladly take a share of any pecuniary profits, resulting from the production of his work. As the publishers endorsed this puerile letter with a memorandum of their readiness to look at the story on its completion, it may be assumed that the manuscript of perhaps the most ludicrous tale of all English literature was submitted to the publishers’ reader. As the absurd performance was not published till the end of May, or an early day of June, 1810, and was then published by Messrs. G. Wilkie and J. Robinson, of 57 Paternoster Row, it may be assumed that after considering their reader’s opinion of the story, Messrs. Longman & Co. declined to publish it,—or at least to publish it on terms the author could consent to accept.

Though it is certain Shelley left Eton prematurely and on account of misbehaviour, the particular misconduct which resulted in his dismissal from the school is unknown. To Peacock (who at the time smiled secretly at the ‘semi-delusion,’ even as in later time he smiled at it openly in the pages of Fraser’s Magazine), Shelley averred that he was sent away from Eton for striking a penknife through the hand of one of his school-fellows, and pinning it to a desk. Of course, Shelley said the ferocious act was the result of extravagant provocation.

To satisfy impartial readers that Shelley did not pin his schoolfellow’s hand to a desk with the blade of a pen-knife, it is enough to say that his comrades at Eton had no recollection of any such incident in his career at the school. How Shelley came to account in so remarkable a manner for his premature withdrawal from the public school, is not left altogether to conjecture. Though he makes no reference to the affair in his Fraser article, Peacock, on hearing Shelley’s astounding story, was doubtless mindful of the case of the military gamester, whose hand (in an early year of the present century) was pinned with a steel fork to the table of a famous gambling-club, as a convenient preliminary to the exposure of what was concealed between his wrist and cuff.

Whilst it is certain that Shelley was not dismissed from Eton for the cause he stated, it is by no means improbable that he was sent home on account of his amiable habit of cursing his own father,—a practice that cannot have favoured the moral tone of school, and on coming to the knowledge of the masters would necessarily move them to a strong expression of disapproval.

It accords with this conjecture, that the Etonians, who called on Shelley at Oxford in Hogg’s presence, obviously regarded his singular way of proclaiming his hatred of his father as the grandest and most memorable of his offences at school. The young man, whose reluctance to repeat the form of cursing for the amusement of his old schoolfellows may be fairly attributed to regretful shame, would naturally in later time shrink from confessing he had been sent away from Eton for so heinous a misdemeanour.

But though he left Eton in disgrace with the masters, the Atheist of the school does not seem to have fallen out of favour with the boys, whose regard he had won by extravagances of unruliness. Hogg speaks of the books (Greek or Latin classics, each inscribed with the donor’s name) given to Shelley by his comrades on his withdrawal from the college, and reasonably urges that the ‘unusual number’ of these parting gifts is sufficient evidence of his eventual popularity with his schoolfellows.

CHAPTER VI.

ZASTROZZI; A ROMANCE. BY P. B. S.

Literary Ambition—Biographical Value of Zastrozzi—The Etonian Shelley’s Disesteem of Marriage—Review of the Romance—Julia and Matilda—Conceits of the Romance reproduced in Laon and Cythna—Egotisms of the Prose Tale and the Poem—The Original of Count Verezzi and Laon.

The literary diversions, that occupied a considerable part of his leisure at Eton, are note-worthy indications of Shelley’s intellectual tastes and aims at a time, when delusive biography represents him as possessed by a passion for scientific studies. Having in his earlier terms at the school found congenial pastime in the composition of childish dramas, he amused himself, after coming under Dr. Lind’s hurtful influence, with translating some of the earlier chapters of Pliny’s Natural History. Medwin assures us it was the boy’s intention to produce a complete English version of that curious medley of fact and fable, but relinquished the enterprise almost at the threshold, on account of his inability to comprehend the philosopher’s chapters on the stars. In his perplexity the youthful translator is said to have sought the aid of Dr. Lind, who avoided the difficulties submitted to his consideration, and at the same time preserved his credit for masterly erudition, by telling his disciple that he had better not waste his time on passages which the best scholars could not understand. In accordance with this prudent counsel, the aspirant to literary eminence bade adieu to Pliny the Elder, and looked about him for an easier way of winning the distinction for which he hungered.

In the spring of 1809, he bethought himself that he would compete with the artists of prose-fiction, and write a novel that should make him as famous as Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and Mr. Matthew Lewis. If the son of a West Indian planter could in his nonage write a novel so famous, that he was universally styled after its title ‘Monk’ Lewis, surely ‘the heir of a gentleman of large fortune’ (as the Etonian described himself in his letter to Messrs. Longman and Co.) might in his nonage produce a romance that should cause him to be talked about as Zastrozzi Shelley. To accomplish this ambition, Shelley went to work on the novel which, certainly begun in Mr. Bethell’s house, and talked about before he left the school, was perhaps written to the last line at Eton; though, in consequence of the delays and postponements which usually attend a literary aspirant’s first steps to celebrity, it was not published by Messrs. G. Wilkie and J. Robinson, of Paternoster Row, till the summer of 1810, when the author had been for some seven or eight weeks a member of the University of Oxford.

Though the idolaters of Shelley’s genius have small reason to thank his most voluminous editor for recovering so absurd a performance from the oblivion that covers most of his puerile follies, the poet’s biographers, and all who are interested in his story, have cause for gratitude to Mr. Buxton Forman, for reprinting in clear type the ludicrous tale, which enables them to examine the mental stuff and texture of the seventeen years’ old boy (sixteen years and nine months old when he began the story, seventeen years and ten months old when he published it) who, fairly forward in Greek, could throw off Latin prose and verse, of more than average goodness, with singular facility.

Were it not for Zastrozzi; a Romance, by P. B. S. (1810), one would be without evidence that Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet of Free Love, did not leave Eton without conceiving the disregard for the religious sanctions of marriage, which developed into a strong repugnance to the institution, and a cordial disapproval of all the restraints imposed on wedlock by law and custom. Readers seriously bent on knowing the Real Shelley, who has been so artfully and dangerously replaced in these later years by the Fictitious Shelley, will do well to give their best attention to the following summary of the story which reveals so much of the poet’s character and disposition, at the moment when he crossed the line that divides boyhood from manhood.

ZASTROZZI; A ROMANCE. BY P. B. S.

The action and successive tragedies of this curious performance result from the craft, energy, and diabolical vindictiveness of Pietro Zastrozzi, the illegitimate son of Olivia Zastrozzi, who in her fifteenth year was seduced, under promise of marriage, by the Count Verezzi, an Italian nobleman. More heartless than a majority of the seducers, who impart piquancy to the novels in which our grand-parents delighted, this nobleman of a southern clime, instead of allowing her the means of subsistence usually accorded in romantic literature to cast-off mistresses, refused to give his victim a crust, when, deserting her and her child (the villain of the book!), he threw himself into the arms of the heiress who became his wife,—and in due course the mother of another Count Verezzi, the virtuous count of the narrative.

Possessing every virtue but womanly discretion and the power to forgive her enemies, the wretched and exemplary Olivia Zastrozzi died in her thirtieth year, after enjoining her son, Pietrino, to avenge his mother s wrongs. Having, in language appropriate to a pious son, mitigated his mother’s mortal agonies with a vow to do her bidding, Pietrino passed from her grave to the cruel world, with a virtuous resolve to compass the destruction of his own father (the elder Count Verezzi), his own half-brother (the younger Count Verezzi), and any persons in whom the same virtuous young Count should be strongly interested. On coming to full manhood, Olivia Zastrozzi’s son, seizing the happy moment and making the most of it, plunged a dagger into his father’s heart, sending him without shrift to the pit that is reserved in the nether regions for the seducers of trustful womankind.

Having disposed of his father in this summary fashion, Pietro Zastrozzi determines to wreak his vengeance on his half-brother by means more secret, ingenious, and horrible. Biding his time till the young Count Verezzi has won the love of Julia Marchesa di Strobazzo, whose affection he worthily reciprocates, and has also gained unintentionally the love of Matilda Contessa di Laurentini, whose passion he is most desirous of avoiding, Pietro Zastrozzi is quick to see his advantage in the mutual jealousy and aversion of the two ladies, and in the embarrassments certain to arise from their idolatry of the same man. To afford his exemplary mother’s soul the vindictive satisfaction for which so pure a spirit is naturally pining, Pietro Zastrozzi approaches these ladies, and, by a series of subtle stratagems and diabolical contrivances, brings them and their Count to extremities of passion and despair; and to deaths, that under the more skilful manipulation of Mrs. Radcliffe or Monk Lewis, would have rendered Zastrozzi a superlatively thrilling and sensational romance.

Resembling one another in the nobility of their lineage, and the enormity of their wealth, and the reputation that had come to them, these two heroines are alike admirable for their different styles of beauty. Whilst Julia is a gentle blonde, Matilda is a Cleopatra, with dark rolling eyes, and breasts made to heave with voluptuous desire. Each of these ladies is in love with the Count at the beginning of the story, which opens with particulars of his seizure at an inn near Munich, as he is journeying southwards to the damsel of his preference.

Captured at this tavern, whilst he breathes heavily and lies helpless under a stupor of Zastrozzi’s contrivance, the Count Verezzi is thrust into a chariot, and conveyed to his place of imprisonment with all the celerity attainable on rough roads, in days long prior to the invention of the steam-locomotive. Drawn by relays of horses, that are put to their fullest speed by Bernardo (the postillion) the chariot moves rapidly throughout the day, till on the approach of nightfall it quits the post-road, and makes slower progress through the rugged underwood of a forest, to the jaws of a cavern yawning in a darksome dell. In this cavern the Count—fastened by a chain to the rock of the cavern’s inmost recess, and fed upon bread and water—is confined for several days and nights, till the rock of his dismal dungeon is broken up during a thunderstorm by a scintillating flash of lightning!

On the morrow of this remarkable storm, the youthful Count is discovered in a plight, which causes his persecutors to liberate him from his manacles, and to call in a physician, who, after carrying the youth out of brain-fever (quite as skilfully as the Hermit, alias Dr. Lind, in Laon and Cythna carries Laon out of brain-fever under similar circumstances), recommends that he should be conveyed, without loss of a single moment, to a scene of tranquillity. In compliance with this advice, the captive is lifted again into the chariot, and conveyed by Zastrozzi and his subordinate villains (Ugo and Bernardo) to a cottage, standing in the middle of a wide and desolate heath, to which they come after four hours’ rapid posting. In that cottage, tended by an old woman (one of Zastrozzi’s creatures), and watched by Ugo and Bernardo, the Count remains till, on his convalescence, he knocks Bernardo down-stairs (in the temporary absence of Zastrozzi, Ugo, and the old woman), and clearing out of the humble tenement, reaches the vicinity of Passau, where he is sheltered and hospitably entertained by the peasant Claudine,—an amiable old woman, who gets her living by raising flowers for the Passau market.

The scene now changes to one of the rural palaces of Matilda La Contessa di Laurentini—a palace of Gothic architecture, whose battlemented walls rise high above the lofty trees of the surrounding forest; the palace in which the Marchesa Julia’s faithful servant, Paulo, dies from the fatal potion, administered to him by Zastrozzi and Matilda. As Paulo’s only offence against La Contessa Matilda is his loyalty to his own mistress, one is constrained to pity the poor fellow, though he makes matters needlessly unpleasant by groaning in his death-torments with excessive loudness, and rolling his eyes in a revolting manner.