BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

In a small southwestern room of the old-fashioned country house named Field Place, in Sussex, there stands over the fireplace this inscription:

Here Percy Bysshe Shelley was born, on Saturday, August 4, 1792. He was the eldest child of Timothy and Elizabeth (Pilfold) Shelley. In this home he had for playmates, as he grew up, four younger sisters, and a brother the youngest of all: and on their memories were imprinted some scenes of his early days. He was fond of them, and as a schoolboy, when they came in to dessert, would take them on his knee and tell them romantic stories out of books on which his own imagination was fed; or he would declaim Latin for his father's pleasure; sometimes he led them on tramps through the fields, dropping his little sister over inconvenient fences, or he romped with them in the garden, not without accident, upsetting his baby brother in the strawberry bed, and being reproached by him as 'bad Bit.' St. Leonard's Wood, off to the northeast of the house, was traditionally inhabited by an old Dragon and a headless Spectre, and there was a fabulous Great Tortoise in Warnham Pond, which he made creatures in their children's world; nearer home was the old Snake, the familiar of the garden, unfortunately killed by the gardener's scythe; and, these not being marvels enough, a gray alchemist resided in the garret. He once dressed his sisters to impersonate fiends, and ran in front with a fire-stove flaming with magical liquids, a sport that readily developed with schoolboy knowledge into rude and startling experiments with chemicals and electricity. Altogether he was an amiable brother, mingling high animal spirits with a delightful imagination and a gentle manner. His young pranks were numerous. He delighted in mystification, both verbal and practical; he invented incidents which he told for truth, and he especially enjoyed the ruse of a disguise. A single childish answer survives in the anecdote that when he set the fagot-stack on fire and was rebuked, he explained that he wanted 'a little hell of his own.' He also wished to adopt a child, a fancy which lasted late into life, and thought a small Gypsy tumbler at the door would serve. As child or boy, all our recollections of him are pleasant and natural, with touches of harmless mischief and vivid fancy. There was a spirit of wildness in him. Even before he went away to school, while still a fair, slight boy, with long, bright hair and full, blue eyes, running about or riding on his pony in the lanes, — where, after spending his own, he would stop and borrow money of the servant to give the beggars, - he attracted the notice of the villagers at Horsham as a madcap. Toward the end of his boyhood he liked to wander out alone at night, but the servant sent to watch him reported that he only 'took a walk and came back again.' Of all the scenes of this early home life, while it was still untroubled, the most attractive is the picture impressed on his five-year-old Bister, Margaret, whose closest childish memory of him was of the day when, being

home ill from Eton, he first went out again, and, coming up to the window where she was, pressed his face against the pane and gave her a kiss through the glass.

His education began at the age of six, when he went for the rudiments of Latin and Greek to the Rev. Mr. Edwards, a Welsh parson at Warnham, and got traditional Welsh instruction from the old man. At ten he was sent away from home to Sion House Academy, near Brentford, under Dr. Greenlaw, whom he afterward spoke of 'not without respect,' says Hogg, as ‘a hard-headed Scotchman, and a man of rather liberal opinions.' Shelley was then tall for his years, with a pink and white complexion, curling brown hair in abundance, large, prominent blue eyes, dull in reverie, flashing in feeling, and au expression of countenance, says his cousin and schoolfellow, Medwin, ' of exceeding sweetness and innocence.' He was met in the playground, shut in by four stone walls with a single tree in it, by some sixty scholars drawn from the English middle class, who, writes Medwin, pounced on every new boy with a zest proportioned to the ordeal each had undergone in his turn. The new boy in this case knew nothing of peg-top, leapfrog, fives, or cricket. One challenged him to spar, and another to race. His only welcome was 'a general shout of derision.' To all this, continues Medwin, he made no reply, but with a look of disdain written in his countenance, turned his back on his new associates, and, when he was alone, found relief in tears.' It was but a step from the boys to the masters. If he idled over his books and watched the clouds, or drew those rude pines and cedars which he used to scrawl on his manuscripts to the end of his life, a box on the ear recalled him; and under English school discipline he had his share of flogging. 'He would roll on the floor,' says Gellibrand, another schoolmate, not from the pain, but from a sense of indignity.' He was a quick scholar, but he did not relish the master's coarseness in Virgil, and though he was well grounded in his classics, he owed little to such a moral discipline as he there received. He was very unhappy, and Medwin does not scruple to describe Sion House as 'a perfect hell' to him. He kept much to himself, but he had pleasures of his own. He formed a taste for the wild sixpenny romances of the time, full of ghosts, bandits, and enchantments; and his curiosity in the wonders of science was awakened by a travelling lecturer, Adam Walker, who exhibited his Orrery at the school. He and Medwin boated together on the river, and ran away at times to Kew and Richmond, where Shelley saw his first play, Mrs. Jordan in the Country Girl.' Sport, however, played a small part in such a boyhood. He passed among his schoolfellows,' says Medwin, as a strange and unsocial being, for when a holiday relieved us from our tasks, and the other boys were engaged in such sports as the narrow limits of our prison court allowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace backwards and forwards, I think I see him now, along the southern wall.' Rennie, another schoolmate, from whom comes the anecdote that Shelley once threw a small boy at his tormentors, adds that, if treated with kindness he was very amiable, noble, high-spirited, and generous.' It is noteworthy that at Sion House he first developed the habit of sleepwalking, for which he was punished.

A single fragment of autobiography softens the harshness of these two years. It is Shelley's description of his first boy friendship : —

'I remember forming an attachment of this kind at school. I cannot recall to my memory the precise epoch at which this took place; but I imagine that it must have been at the age of eleven or twelve. The object of these sentiments was a boy about my own age, of a character eminently generous, brave and gentle; and the elements of human feeling seem to have been, from his birth, genially compounded within him. There was a delicacy and simplicity in his manners inexpressibly attractive. It has