SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE English poet, was born on Aug. 4, 1792, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sus sex. He was the eldest child of Timothy Shelley (1753-1844), M.P. for Shoreham, by his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Charles Pilfold, of Effingham, Surrey. His father was the son and heir of Sir Bysshe Shelley, Bart. (baptized Percy Bysshe; 1731-1815), whose baronetcy (1806) was a reward from the Whig party for political services. Sir Bysshe's father Timothy had emigrated to America, and he himself had been born in Newark, New Jersey; but he came back to England, and did well for himself by marry ing successively two heiresses, the first, the mother of Timothy, being his cousin, Mary Catherine, daughter of the Rev. Theobald Michell of Horsham. He was a handsome man of enterprising and ambitious character, accumulated a large fortune, built Castle Goring, and lived in sullen and penurious retirement in his closing years. None of his talent seems to have descended to his son Timothy, who, except for being of a rather oddly self-assertive character, was undistinguishable from the ordinary run of com monplace country squires. The mother of the poet, who was his father's second cousin, is described as beautiful, and a woman of good abilities, but not with any literary turn; she was an agree able letter-writer. The branch of the Shelley family to which the poet Percy Bysshe belonged traces its pedigree to Henry Shelley, of Worminghurst, Sussex, who died in 1623. These Worming hurst or Castle Goring Shelleys are of the same stock as the Michelgrove Shelleys, who trace up to Sir William Shelley, judge of the common pleas under Henry VII., thence to a member of parliament in 1415, and to the reign of Edward I., or even to the epoch of the Norman Conquest. The Worminghurst branch was a family of credit, but not of special distinction, until its fortunes culminated under the above-named Sir Bysshe.
In the character of Percy Bysshe Shelley three qualities became early manifest, and may be regarded as innate : impressionable ness or extreme susceptibility to external and internal impulses of feeling; a lively imagination or erratic fancy, blurring a sound estimate of solid facts; and a resolute repudiation of outer author ity or the despotism of custom. These qualities were highly de veloped in his earliest manhood, were active in his boyhood, and no doubt made some show even on the borderland between child hood and infancy. At the age of six he was sent to a day school at Warnham, kept by the Rev. Mr. Edwards; at ten to Sion House School, Brentford, of which the principal was Dr. Greenlaw, while the pupils were mostly sons of local tradesmen; at twelve (or im mediately before that age, on the 29th of July 1804) to Eton. The headmaster of Eton, up to nearly the close of Shelley's so journ in the school, was Dr. Goodall, a mild disciplinarian; it is therefore a mistake to suppose that Percy (unless during his very brief stay in the lower school) was frequently flagellated by the formidable Dr. Keate, who only became headmaster after Goodall. Shelley was a shy, sensitive, mopish sort of boy from one point of view—from another a very unruly one, having his own notions of justice, independence and mental freedom; by nature gentle, kindly and retiring—under provocation dangerously violent. He
resisted the odious fagging system, exerted himself little in the routine of school-learning, and was known both as "Mad Shelley" and as "Shelley the Atheist." Shelley's first published work, a romance entitled "Zastrozzi" (181o), appeared shortly before he left Eton. This volume was followed quickly by "Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire" (i8io) written in collaboration with his sister Elizabeth ; and another romance "St. Irvyne or the Rosicru cian" (I8I I). In these early efforts Shelley played the sedulous ape to "Monk" Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Rosa Matilda and other exponents of the "School of Terror," but worthless though they may be intrinsically, they are not without interest as having been written by the same hand that gave us "Prometheus Unbound," and "Hellas." Oxford Life.—Shelley entered University College, Oxford, in April 181o, returned thence to Eton, and finally quitted the school at mid-summer, and commenced residence in Oxford in October. Here he met a young Durham man, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who had preceded him in the university by a couple of months ; the two youths at once struck up a warm and intimate friendship. Shelley had at this time a love for chemical experiment, as well as for poetry, philosophy and classical study, and was in all his tastes and bearing an enthusiast. He continued to write verse and pub lished at Oxford a small collection entitled"PosthumousFragments of Margaret Nicholson" (I8I o). The title was suggested by Hogg and is the only touch of the burlesque in what otherwise is a feeble attempt at serious poetry. Hogg was not an enthusiast, but he was a steady and well-read classical student. In religious mat ters both were sceptics ; whether Hogg, as the senior and more informed disputant, pioneered Shelley into strict atheism, or whether Shelley, as the more impassioned and unflinching specu lator, outran the easy-going jeering Hogg, is a moot point ; we in cline to the latter opinion. Certain it is that each egged on the other by perpetual disquisition on abstruse subjects, conducted partly for the sake of truth and partly for that of mental exercita tion, without on either side any disposition to bow to authority or stop short of extreme conclusions. The upshot of this habit was that Shelley and Hogg, at the close of some five months of happy and uneventful academic life, got expelled from the university. Shelley—for he alone figures as the writer of the "little syllabus," although there can be no doubt that Hogg was his confidant and coadjutor throughout—published anonymously a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism (181i), which he sent round to bishops and all sorts of people as an invitation or challenge to discussion. It amounted to saying that neither reason nor testimony is ade quate to establish the existence of a deity, and that nothing short of a personal individual self-revelation of the deity would be suf ficient.