12 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
It may not be irrelevant to mention that Miss Michell, Sir Bysshe’s first wife, was my grandfather’s first cousin; and that my mother bore the same degree of consanguinity to Miss Pilfold; their fathers being brothers; which circumstances I mention in order to account for the intimacy of our families, and mine with Bysshe, as he was always called. Among the letters of an aunt of mine, was found one [See Appendix No. 1] from him, written in his eleventh year, and which I give entire, not so much on account of its merit, or as a literary curiosity, but to show the early regard he entertained for me, the playfulness of his character as a boy, and the dry humour of franking the letter, his father then being member of Parliament for the Rape of Bramber; nor is it less valuable to show his early fondness for a boat.
He was most engaging and amiable as a child; such as he, afterwards thinking
perhaps of himself, describes:—
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 13 |
He was a gentle boy, And in all gentle sports took joy; Oft in a dry leaf for a boat, With a small feather for a sail, His fancy on that spring would float, If some invisible breeze might stir Its marble calm.—Rosalind and Helen. |
Percy Bysshe Shelley was brought up in retirement at
Field Place, and received the same education as his elder sisters, being instructed in the
rudiments of Latin and Greek by Mr. Edwards, the clergyman of Warnham,
(the parish in which they lived), a good old man, but of very limited intellects, and whose
preaching might have been edifying if his Welch pronunciation had made it intelligible; at
all events, his performance of the service was little calculated to inspire devotion. At
ten years of age he was sent to Sion House, Brentford, where I had preceded him. This
school, though not a “Dotheboys-hall,” was conducted with the greatest regard
to economy. A slice of bread with an “idée” of butter smeared on the surface, and “thrice skimmed
skyblue,”
14 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
The lady of the house was by no means a Mrs.
Squeers—I do not remember seeing her five times whilst I was at the
seminary of learning,—she was too fine to have anything to do with all the dirty
details of the household; she was, or was said to be, connected with the Duke of Argyle—I never knew one of the Scottish nation
who did not claim relationship, or clanship, with the noble
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 15 |
Exchanging for the caresses of his sisters an association with boys, mostly the sons of London shopkeepers, of rude habits and coarse manners, who made game of his girlishness, and despised him because he was not “one of them;” not disposed to enter into their sports, to wrangle, or fight; confined between four stone walls, in a playground of very limited dimensions—a few hundred yards—(with a single tree in it, and that the Bell tree, so called from its having suspended in its branches, the odious bell whose din, when I think of it, yet jars my ears,) instead of breathing the pure air of his native fields, and rambling about the plantations and flower gardens of his father’s country seat—the sufferings he underwent at his first outset in this little world were most acute.
Sion House was indeed a perfect hell to him.
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There rose From the near school-room, voices, that alas! Were but one echo from a world of woes, The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. |
Day after day—week after week— I walked about like a thing alive— Alas! dear friend! you must believe The heart is stone—it did not break. |
We were about sixty school-fellows. I well remember the day when he was
added to the number. A new arrival is always a great excitement to the other boys, who
pounce upon a fresh man with the boldness of birds of prey. We all
had had to pass through this ordeal, and the remembrance of it gave my companions a zest
for torture. All tormented him with questionings. There was no end to their mockery, when
they found that he was ignorant of pegtop or
18 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
Shelley was at this time tall for his age, slightly
and delicately built, and rather narrow chested, with a complexion fair and ruddy, a face
rather long than oval. His features, not regularly handsome, were set off by a profusion of
silky brown hair, that curled naturally. The expression of countenance was one of exceeding
sweetness and innocence. His blue eyes were very large and prominent, considered by
phrenologists to indicate a great aptitude for verbal memory. They were at times, when he
was abstracted, as he often was in contemplation, dull, and, as it were,
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 19 |
I have said that he was delicately framed, and it has been remarked, “that it is often noticed in those of very fine and susceptible genius. That mysterious influence, which the mind exercises over the body, seeming to prevent the growth of physical strength, when the intellect is kept ever alive, and the spirits continually are agitated.”
“As his port had the meekness of a maiden, 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
20 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 21 |
As a proof of his great sweetness of disposition and feeling for others, I will cite an example of which I was an eye-witness. His sisters, on the occasion of a visit with himself to a young lady of their own age, and a near relation, who was shy, reserved, and awkward, behaved to her as he considered rudely, at which Shelley was much hurt, endeavoured to soothe her, and severely reprimanded his sisters, and persuaded his father, on his return home, to call and make apology for them.
Such was Shelley when noviciated at
Sion House Academy. Our master, a Scotch doctor of law, and a divine, was a choleric man,
of a sanguinary complexion, in a green old age; not wanting in good qualities, but very
capricious in his temper, which, good or bad, was influenced
22 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
“Me, Carolus Mackintosh, de dono, dedit,
alumnus,
Præceptor, præsensu, accipit atque tenet.” |
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 23 |
Shelley certainly imbibed no love of the classics, much as he afterwards cultivated them, from this Dominie. The dead languages were to him as bitter a pill as they had been to Byron, but he acquired them, as it were intuitively, and seemingly without study, for during school-hours he was wont to gaze at the passing clouds,—all that could be seen from the lofty windows which his desk fronted—or watch the swallows as they flitted past, with longing for their wings; or would scrawl in his school-books—a habit he always continued—rude drawings of pines and cedars, in memory of those on the lawn of his native home. On these occasions, our master would sometimes peep over his shoulder, and greet his ears with no pleasing salutation.
Our pedagogue, when he was in one of his good humours, dealt also in what
he called facetiæ, and when we came to the
imprisonment of the winds in the Cave of Eolus, as
described in the Æneid, used, to the
merriment of the school, who enjoyed the joke much, to indulge
24 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
A scene, that to poor Shelley, who
instead of laughing had made a face at the silly attempt at wit, and which his preceptor
had probably observed, has often recurred to me. A few days after this, he had a theme set
him for two Latin lines on the subject of Tempestas. He came to me to assist him in the task. I had got a
cribbing book, and of which I made great use—Ovid’s Tristibus. I knew that the only work of Ovid with
which the doctor was acquainted was the Metamorphoses, the only one, indeed, read in that and other seminaries of
learning, and by what I thought great good luck, happened to stumble on two lines exactly
applicable to the
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 25 |
Jam jam tacturos sidera celsa putes. |
When Shelley’s turn came to
carry up his exercise, my eyes were turned on the Dominie. There was
a peculiar expression in his features, which, like the lightning before the storm,
portended what was coming. The spectacles, generally lifted above his dark and bushy brows,
were lowered to their proper position, and their lenses had no sooner caught the said
hexameter and pentameter than he read with a loud voice the stolen line, laying a sarcastic
emphasis on every word, and suiting the action to the word by boxes on each side of
Shelley’s ears. Then came the comment,
“‘Jam
jam,’—Pooh, pooh, boy! raspberry jam! Do you think you are
at your mother’s?” Here a burst of laughter echoed through the
listening benches. “Don’t you know that I have a sovereign objection to
those two monosyllables, with which schoolboys cram their verses? haven’t I told
you so a hundred
26 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
Poor Shelley! I had been the cause of his misfortune—of what affected him more than this unjust punishment—the ridicule of the whole school; and I was half inclined to have opened my desk, and produced, to the shame of the ignorant pedagogue, the original line of the great Latin poet, which this Crispinus had so savagely abused, but terror, a persuasion that his penance would be light compared to mine, soon repressed the impulse.
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 27 |
Youthful feelings are not deep, but the impression of this scene long left a sting behind it; perhaps Shelley, in brooding over the prediction as to his incapacity for writing Latin verses, then resolved to falsify it, for he afterwards, as will appear by two specimens which I give in their proper place, became a great proficient in the art.
He passed among his schoolfellows 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, indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the
chaotic elements, if I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful a world. I very
early learned to penetrate into this soul sublime—why may I not say divine, for what
is there that comes nearer to God than genius in the heart of a child? I, too, was the only
one at the school with whom he could communicate
28 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 29 |
Half-year after half-year passed away, and in spite of his seeming neglect
of his tasks, he soon surpassed all his competitors, for his memory was so tenacious that
he never forgot a word once turned up in his dictionary. He was very fond of reading, and
greedily devoured all the books which were brought to school after the holidays; these were
mostly blue books. Who does not know what blue books mean? but if
there should be any one ignorant enough not to know what those dear darling volumes, so
designated from their covers, contain, be it known, that they are or were to be bought for
sixpence, and embodied stories of haunted castles, bandits, murderers, and other grim
personages—a most exciting and
30 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
But this stock was very soon exhausted. As there was no school library, we
soon resorted, “under the rose,” to a low circulating one in the town
(Brentford), and here the treasures at first seemed inexhaustible. Novels at this time, (I
speak of 1803) in three goodly volumes, such as we owe to the great Wizard of the North, were unknown. Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, formed the staple of the collection. But these
authors were little to Shelley’s taste.
Anne Ratcliffe’s works pleased him most,
particularly the Italian, but the
Rosa-Matilda school, especially a strange, wild
romance, entitled “Zofloya, or the
Moor,” a Monk-Lewisy production,
where his Satanic Majesty, as in Faust,
plays the chief part, enraptured him. The two novels he afterwards
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 31 |
“Accursed,” said Schiller, “the folly of our nurses, who distort the imagination
with frightful ghost stories, and impress ghastly pictures of executions on our weak
brains, so that involuntary shudderings seize the limbs of a man, making them rattle in
frosty agony,” &c. “But who knows,” he adds,
“if these traces of early education be ineffaceable in us?”
Schiller was, however, himself much addicted to this sort of
reading. It is said of Collins that he employed his
mind chiefly upon works of fiction
32 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
This constant dwelling on the marvellous, had considerable influence on Shelley’s imagination, nor is it to be wondered, that at that age he entertained a belief in apparitions, and the power of evoking them, to which he alludes frequently in his afterworks, as in Alastor:
By forcing some lone ghost, My messenger, to render up the tale Of what we are; |
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 33 |
Oh, there are genii of the air, And genii of the evening breeze, And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair As star-beams among twilight trees; |
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead, I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed— I was not heard—I saw them not. |
After supping on the horrors of the Minerva press, he was subject to
strange, and sometimes frightful dreams, and was haunted by apparitions that bore all the
semblance of reality. We did not sleep in the same dormitory, but I shall never forget one
moonlight night seeing Shelley walk into my room. He
was in a state of somnambulism. His eyes were open, and he advanced with slow steps to the
window, which, it being the height of summer, was open, I got
34 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
This was the only occasion, however, to my knowledge, that a similar event occurred at school, but I remember that he was severely punished for this involuntary transgression. If, however, he ceased at that time to somnambulize, he was given to waking dreams, a sort of lethargy and abstraction that became habitual to him, and after the accès was over, his eyes flashed, his lips quivered, his voice was tremulous with emotion, a sort of ecstacy came over him, and he talked more like a spirit or an angel than a human being.
The second or third year after Shelley’s domicile at Sion House, Walker gave a course of lectures in the great room at the academy, and
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 35 |
36 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
LIFE OF SHELLEY. | 37 |
38 | LIFE OF SHELLEY. |
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“It was past ten when we reached the hotel, some excellent tea and
a liberal supply of hot muffins in the coffee-room, now quiet and solitary, were the
more grateful after the wearisome delay and vast deviation. Shelley often turned his head, and cast eager glances towards the door;
and whenever the waiter replenished our teapot, or approached our box, he was
interrogated whether any one had called. At last the desired summons was brought;
Shelley drew forth some
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