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 6000_l._ 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

6000_l._ 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, 4000_l._ a-year. If the two lots of

estate yielded a clear income of 4000_l._ they were worth about 80,000_l._

If they yielded as much as 6000_l._, they were worth about 120,000_l._

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 40_l._ 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 40_l._ for it. [Mr. Packe's words,

'for which, I think, he received 40_l._,' are, of course, to be read 'for

which he received, I think, 40_l._'--_i.e._ as the statement of a witness,

certain that a considerable sum was paid, though uncertain whether 40_l._

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 40_l._, 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.