Shelley, the poet's father, was a country gentleman-dull, consequential, irritable, but not unkindly in disposition, who in the House of Commons gave an unwavering vote for the Whig party, and who was secured from all risk of aberration from the social conventions by a happy inaccessibility to ideas. His wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Charles Pilfold of Effingham, Surrey, was beautiful in person, and a woman of good sense, when her good sense was not obscured by temper. Though no lover of literature, she was an excellent letter-writer.

Percy, the eldest child, inherited his mother's beauty. He was slight of figure, of fair and ruddy complexion, with luminous blue eyes, and hair curling naturally, which changed from golden to a rich brown ; in temperament gentle yet excitable, of rare sensibility, prone to yield up his imagination to fantastic tale or vision, but not devoid of a certain quaint mirthfulness which took delight in oddity and surprises. Having acquired some knowledge of Latin from a neighbouring country parson, he was sent at ten years old to Sion House Academy, Isleworth, where Dr. Greenław taught some fifty or sixty boys, chiefly of the social middle class, and where Shelley's cousin, Thomas Medwin, was a pupil. The rough tyranny of the elder lads, who looked on the new scholar as strange and unsocial because he was sensitive and shy, sometimes drove him to violent outbreaks of passion; yet, says his schoolfellow Rennie, "if treated with kindness, he was very amiable, noble, high-spirited, and generous." Here Shelley made some progress in classical learning; his sense of intellectual wonder was much stimulated by scientific lectures; and his heart awoke to the new and exquisite pleasure of romantic attachment to a boy of about his own age, whom he describes as of a character eminently generous, brave, and gentle.

His

In 1804 he passed from Sion House Academy to Eton, at that date under the headmastership of Dr. Goodall, an excellent scholar and kindly gentleman, but one who held the reins of authority perhaps somewhat too loosely. Shelley's tutor, George Bethell, with whom he boarded, was unluckily the dullest man in Eton; he had the merit, however, of being good-humoured and well-meaning. At Eton as at Sion House Shelley stood apart from the throng of his schoolfellows. spirit rose in rebellion against the system of fagging; he did not join in the school sports; he pursued studies in which his young coevals did not care to follow him. All things seemed to point out "mad Shelley" as a fit and proper victim upon whom the other boys might let loose their animal spirits. "I have seen him," wrote a schoolfellow, "surrounded, hooted, baited like a maddened bull." If it was his tormentors' wish to excite their victim to paroxysms of rage, they often attained the desired end. Yet here, as at his earlier school, he won the goodwill of

a few of his schoolfellows, who describe him as generous and openhearted, of remarkable tenderness of heart, possessed of much moral courage, and fearing nothing but what was false or low. No friend pleased him better than old Dr. Lind of Windsor, a man original in character and opinions, and of most amiable temper. Shelley has given idealised portraits of this friend of his boyhood in Zonoras of "Prince Athanase" and the aged hermit of "The Revolt of Islam."

Shelley's interest in what we may term the romantic side of modern science increased during the Eton years. He read the classics with a delight in the beauty of the poetry and a keen interest in the philosophical views of certain writers,-among these Lucretius and Pliny,— but without showing much capacity for minute exactness of scholarship. The chief masters of his intellect were those eighteenth century thinkers who seemed to bring into a certain harmony the destructive or sceptical criticism of the age and those boundless hopes for the future which sprung phantomlike from the ruins of the past. He was too young to have learned the lessons of experience derived from the facts of the French Revolution, as they developed themselves from day to day. He accepted the doctrine of the Aufklärung from Godwin's Political Justice with awed and delighted mind. With Condorcet he beheld as in a vision the endless progress of the human race. His dreams were bright and generous dreams of youth, and in truth they were not altogether of a baseless fabric. Much that has become actual in the nineteenth century has grown out of the visions and aspirations of the age of revolution; much perhaps remains to be realised.

Two moments of boyhood memorable in the development of his spirit have found record in Shelley's verse-that in which, escaping from the feelings of resentment and revenge excited by the persecutions and tyrannies of school, he vowed, for his own part, to be just, gentle, wise, and free; and that other moment when his imagination, escaping from the excitements of gross, fantastic horror, devoted its powers to the pursuit of spiritual beauty. The record of one of these moments will be found in the dedication of "The Revolt of Islam"; the record of the other in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." Both of these inspirations of high resolve came in the springtime, when the awakened life of nature seemed to reinforce the vitality of the spirit.

Before leaving Eton Shelley was an author. The romance of Zastrozzi, published in April 1810, was written, at least in great part, a year earlier. This and a second romance, St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, which appeared before the close of the same year, are indescribably but not unaccountably absurd in their crude efforts at sublimity, their overwrought horrors, their pseudo-passion, their sentimental inanities. The

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author, still a boy, was yielding an untrained imagination to the romantic movement of his day, as represented by its worst models, just as he had yielded his intellect in bondage, which fancied itself liberty, to the revolutionary speculators and dreamers. Shelley's boyish romances cease to be inexplicably bad when we have made acquaintance with certain Minerva Press novels of the same date; we see that he was only a disciple, not a creator, of the fantastic-absurd, to which Mrs. Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis had given a vogue, and which just at this date was satirised in Northanger Abbey, the earliest novel of our most exquisite humorist of domestic life. A poem in several cantos on the subject of "The Wandering Jew" was written (1810) by Medwin and Shelley in conjunction; four cantos appeared after Shelley's death, but it is uncertain whether they contain more than a few lines from his hand. A thin volume of verse entitled Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire, the work of Shelley and another, actually saw the light in September 1810; it was speedily withdrawn from circulation by the publisher on discovering the fact that one of the pieces was a transcript from the pages of M. G. Lewis. No copy of the Original Poetry is known to exist, and we can hardly regret the disappearance of verses which a reviewer describes, in all probability not unjustly, as "downright scribble.”

It has been suggested that Shelley's coadjutor who assumed the feminine name "Cazire" was his cousin Harriet Grove, a beautiful girl of his own age, whom he loved with a boy's first ardour, and whom he would fain have made a partner in his own social, political, and religious beliefs and disbeliefs. The tone of his correspondence alarmed Harriet's family, and before long they had another settlement for her in view. Shelley suffered, or imagined that he suffered, much, declaimed against bigotry, and was resolved henceforth to wage bitter war against that destroyer of human happiness.

In

Having matriculated at University College, Oxford, in April 1810, Shelley entered on residence in Michaelmas term of the same year. his fellow-student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, son of a north-country gentleman of Tory politics, he found his closest ally. Hogg had high intellectual powers and a genuine love of literature; his type of mind and character was as remote from Shelley's as can well be conceived; he was keen-sighted, shrewd, sarcastic, but not devoid of some of the generosity of youth; and he was highly interested in observing such a singular and charming phenomenon among young Oxonians of the days of the Regency as the idealist Shelley. Every one who knows anything of Shelley's life knows Hogg's admirable portrayal of Shelley at Oxford; every one has been an intimate with Hogg in the college chambers, wildly confused with electrical and chemical apparatus; has

heard the eager discourse of the young enthusiast concerning the mysteries of nature and the deeper mysteries of mind; has seen him at his favourite sports of skimming stones and sailing paper-boats on river or pond; has strode across country with the pair in their joyous winter walks, and shared the frugal supper which they enjoyed on their return; has witnessed "the divine poet's" sweet humanity towards those who needed the sustenance of hand or heart, and no less his sudden outbreaks of indignation against the wrongdoer and the oppressor; has smiled with the narrator at the quaint freaks and fancies of the immortal child.

"The devotion, the reverence, the religion with which he was kindled towards all the masters of intellect," says Hogg, "cannot be described." The biographer speaks of the purity and "sanctity" of Shelley's life, of his "meek seriousness" of heart, and "marvellous gentleness" of disposition. But with reverence for the self-elected masters of his intellect, and this marvellous gentleness Shelley united a contempt for inheritance and tradition, and an intellectual audacity which was unchecked by any adequate sense of the difficulties encompassing the great problems of human thought. His guides were the lights of the eighteenth-century illumination. Had he mastered Kant as well as Holbach, and submitted his intellect to Burke as he submitted it to Godwin, he might not have shot up as quickly, but his roots would have plunged deeper and embraced the soil more firmly. Yet it is hard to conceive Shelley as other than he actually was. And it may be that the logical gymnastic of his studies in eighteenth-century thinkers and those especially of France-saved him in some degree from the dangers of an excessive tendency towards the visionary. "Had it not been for this sharp brushing away of intellectual cobwebs," writes Mr. Salt, "his genius, always prone to mysticism and metaphysical subtleties, might have lost itself. . . in a labyrinth of dreams and phantasies, and thus have wasted its store of moral enthusiasm." Only we must remember that in the eighteenth-century crusade against thrones and churches there was a good deal of visionary destructiveness, as events have proved, and that a part of Shelley's moral enthusiasm, as some of us venture to think, was not wisely directed.

Shelley's career at University College was brief. In February 1811 a small pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism was issued from a provincial press at Worthing in Sussex. The author's name was not given, but in Oxford, where the pamphlet was offered for sale, it was known to be the work of Shelley. On being interrogated by the master of his college Shelley refused to answer the questions put to him. The same questions were put to Hogg, who had come forward to remon

strate with the authorities; he also declined to reply, and on 25th March both youths were expelled from University College for contumacy in refusing to answer questions and declining to disavow the publication.

"I once was an enthusiastic Deist," Shelley wrote a few weeks later, "but never a Christian." His atheism was the denial of a creator rather than the denial of a living spirit of the universe. A Christian he never became in the theological sense of that word; but certainly, at a later time, he deeply reverenced the personal character of Jesus. And his militant ardour against the historical developments of Christianity in some degree waned as he became better acquainted with the literature and art of medieval Italy. His faith in later years had in it something of Plato's and of Berkeley's idealism; something perhaps also of the philosophic system of Spinoza.

A word must be said of the "Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson," which appeared in Shelley's first term at University College. Poems written with a serious intention, but bearing all the marks of immaturity, were put forth under cover of a jest, and were perhaps retouched-Hogg assisting-with a view to burlesque effect. Margaret Nicholson, a mad washerwoman, had attempted the King's life, and was now in Bedlam. It was decided that she should be the authoress of the verses, and that their publication should be posthumous, under the editorial supervision of an imaginary nephew, John Fitz-Victor. The pamphlet was brought out in quarto form; the mystification perhaps delighted the author, but we do not find it difficult to credit the publisher's statement that the work was almost still-born.

On quitting Oxford the two college friends resided for a while together in London lodgings. Mr. Timothy Shelley refused to receive his son at Field Place unless he would undertake to break off all communication with Hogg, and submit himself to appointed tutors and governors. Such conditions Shelley declined to accept, and so remained in exile from his home with a sore feeling that he was unjustly punished for intellectual beliefs for which he was not morally responOn Hogg's departure to his friends, Shelley remained in lodgings alone. His younger sisters were schoolgirls at Clapham, and through them he had already made the acquaintance of their companion, Harriet Westbrook, a pink and white schoolgirl beauty of sixteen, with a pleasant temper, a bright smile, and a pretty manner,-the daughter of a retired London coffee-house keeper. Her guide and guardian, the elder Miss Westbrook, already thirty years old, showed a most affectionate interest in the young misbeliever, who was also a prospective baronet with a great property entailed, wrote to him, called on him with Harriet, conducted him to church, read under his guidance the works of heretics.