SHELLEY, PEacr BYSSHE ( 1792-1822 ) . An English revolutionary and lyric poet of the high est rank. Shelley was of old English stock. His grandfather, Bysshe, who was born in America and on his removal to England as heir to a small landed estate enriched the family by wealthy marriages, was made a baronet in 1806. Shelley, the eldest child of Timothy and Elizabeth (Pil ford), was the hope of this new establishment. lle was born at Field Place, Warnham, near Horsham, England, on August 4, 1702. He stud ied first under the Rev. Thomas Edwards, of Horsham, then in a middle-class school known as Sion House Academy. near Brantford. also kept by a clergyman named Dr. Greenlaw. At this school the sensitive boy was persecuted by his fellows to such an extent that he developed a fierce hatred of oppression. At the same time he began to love science ardently, although his temperament was romantic rather than scientific. At the age of thirteen lie went to Eton, where he again showed his hatred of tyranny. In October, 1810, he went to University College, Oxford, where his father had been before him. The boy displayed literary precocity, and his family in dulged him in a taste for early publication: at Eton he had published Zastrozzi, a wild romance, and at Oxford he wrote a second tale, St. Irryne, and various ventures in verse. After a scant six months' residence be was expelled from the university on account of a tract, The Necessity of Atheism, which lie had published and cir culated. Though he was only a youth of eigh teen, English radicalism of the stripe of God win's had declared itself in him in many ways; and before his faculty for verse had ripened or manifested itself with any distinctness, his mind was given to materialistic and individualistic ideas, projects of social and political reform. and to their advocacy in prose tracts. He carried his independence into his actions. At this youthful time his conduct was undisciplined by judgment, and his mind was unsettled in intellectual prin ciples. He was by nature impulsive and by habit uncontrollable; his ardency showed itself by quick execution as well as by emotionalism.
His home was never a comfortable abiding place for him. and disagreement with his family, stolid and conventional people, was an increasing facto• until it brought about complete alienation. His expulsion from Oxford was followed the next summer by a romantic marriage, one rather of pity than of love, with the sixteen-year-old daughter of a retired London tavern-keeper, Har riet 'Westbrook, with whom he had 'become ac quainted through his sister. They eloped and were married in Edinburgh, and thereafter lived a and deht-harassed life in different parts of England and in Ireland, whither Shelley went in 1812 with a view to political agitation of which his Addrrss to the Irish People, Proposals for an Association, and his public speech at Dub lin on O'Connell's platform are memorials. He became a subject of Government surveillance as a dangerous eharacter. II is position was improved by the linaneial arrangements made vvlien he came of age in 1813, hut his domestic life had become troubled and coldness had come to exist between husband and wife. In July, 1814, he eloped with Mary Godwin, putting in practice the principles hp held and dealing openly with Harriet, for whom he made provision; but mis fortune followed, and in 1810 Harriet committed suicide by drowning. and a few months later their two children were denied to Shelley's custody by the famous decision of Lord Eldon, on the ground that Shelley was an atheist. Shelley soon after left England and spent the remainder of his brief life in Italy, going from city to city, finally set tling in the neighborhood of Pisa. July S, 1822, be sailed from Leghorn to Spezia, where be had settled for the summer. A squall overwhelmed the little craft in which Shelley was, and he was drowned. The body, which was thrown up on the shore at Viareggio, was burned and the ashes. ex cept the heart, which was uneonsumed, were buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome. He had several ehildren, of whom one only survived him, Percy, who inherited the title on his grand father's death.