1. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by MRS. SHELLEY. 3 vols. London, 1847. 2. Shelley at Oxford-Papers in the New Monthly Magazine, Vols. 36 and 37. THE poems of Shelley have been gradual- |in the County of Sussex, and the family of The name of Shelley is an ancient one 1 away with an heiress, through whom the branch of his descendants with whom we are chiefly concerned are possessed of the estate of Horsham. In some short time Sir Bysshe finds himself an active widower, and lays siege to the heart of Miss Sidney Perry-the heiress of Penshurst, the estate of Sir Philip Sidney. The present Lord De Lisle and Dudley represents this branch of Sir Bysshe's descendants. Through some mistake the poet Shelley is repeatedly minds of the family was ancestral pride. represented-even by such writers as Mr. The one great and irreparable offence which Howitt, as a descendant of Sir Philip Shelley could commit against the family Sidney. The sole connexion between them was to unite himself in marriage unsuitably. -if it can be called such--was that which In remote parts of the country, among the we have stated. It, however, gratified the less educated part of the higher gentry, imagination of the poet. this feeling often strengthens itself into Bysshe Shelley was raised to the baronet-something little short of insanity, and the age in 1806. He died in 1815. Medwin fortunate adventures of Sir Bysshe Shelley, and the mésalliances of his daughters, were not unlikely to render the Shelleys most incurably mad. tells us, The poet was born the 4th of August, 1792, and brought up at Field-Place (his father's residence) till his tenth year with his sisters, and taught the rudiments of Latin and Greek. He was then sent to Sion House, Brentford, where Medwin had The school was a cheap bad school, penu "I remember Sir Bysshe in a very advanced age, a remarkably handsome man, fully six feet in height, and with a noble and aristocratic bearing, Nil fuit unquam sic impar sibi. His manner of life was most eccentric, for he used to frequent daily the tap-room of one of the low inns in Horsham, and there drank with some of the lowest citizens, a habit he had probably acquired in the New World. Though he had built a castle been already placed. (Goring-Castle) that cost him upwards of £80,000, he passed the last twenty or thirty years of his existence in a small cottage looking on the riously managed, and the boys for the most River Arun, at Horsham, in which all was mean part the sons of London shop-keepers. The and beggarly-the existence indeed of a miser-lady who was supposed to manage the enriching his legatees at the expense of one of his household details was too fine for her busisons, by buying up his postobits."-MEDWIN'S ness; but--as a part of her stock in trade Life of Shelley, vol. i., p. 8. -had a pedigree at least as good as Shelley's. She was a cousin to the Duke of Medwin was related to one of Sir Bys- Argyle. We rather like the poor woman she's wives, and his account of a family the better for this, we own, and though the whom he must have known perfectly well is instincts of self-defence, and the sense of far from favourable to any of them. He de- what was due to her family, made her perscribes Timothy Shelley, the poet's father, haps treat the Sussex Squirearchy less deas watching with impatience for his father's ferentially than they expected, her sister, death, and he speaks of two of Sir Bysshe's who must have been as nearly related to daughters as marrying without his consent; the Duke as herself, was 66 an economist of of which he availed himself-for so we un- the first order." derstand the statement-to avoid giving After all, if boys of whatever rank are them any fortune whatever. “He died at last, and in his room were found bank-notes to the amount of £10,000, some in the leaves of the few books he possessed, others in the folds of his sofa, or sewed into the lining of his dressing gown."-MEDWIN, p. 9. sent to schools selected for their cheapness, they ought not to remember and resent, as if it were the fault of their masters or mistresses, the stinginess of their parents. The usual stories of the sufferings of boys, whose health is in any way infirm or whose spirits are too weak for the kind of ordeal Shelley's father is described as a man to which their fellow students subject them, whose early education had been much neg-are tediously told by "the wearisome Caplected. He had, however, taken a degree tain." The incompetence of the master is at Oxford-made the grand tour, and sat proved by his punishing Shelley for some in Parliament for a family borough. Med-faults in an exercise written for him by win's recollections of him are unfavourable. Medwin, who had cribbed the bad Latin, it He tells us that he was a man who "re- seems, from Ovid. This incident, and the duced all politeness to forms, and moral fact that Shelley disliked learning to dance, virtue to expediency." In short he was a are the Captain's sole records of Brentford man very like other men of whom there is little to be said that can furnish a page to the biographer. The one feeling which seems to have absorbed all others in the "Visits to Remarkable Places," vol.; and also "Homes and Haunts of the Poets." school. It was scarce worth making a book for this-and yet in one point of view Medwin's testimony is not without some value. Shelley's detestation of school and the tyranny of the elder boys, has been in general understood as exclusively to be re ferred to Eton, and the effect of his sojourn | habitually given to waking dreams, from there. It probably arose from his detesta- which he was with great difficulty roused. tion of this miserable place-which seems When he did awake," his eyes flashed, his to have been, in every possible point of view, ill-chosen. Shelley learned little at school--at least of school learning -Nothing, that my tyrants knew or taught, Cared I to learn." Still his mind was not inactive "Eager he reads whatever tells Of magic, cabala, and spells." "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?"MEDWIN. lips quivered, his voice was tremulous with emotion; a sort of ecstasy came over him, and he talked more like a spirit or an angel than a human being."-MEDWIN, vol. i., p. 34. From Brentford school Shelley went to Eton, where he passed two years. Of this period of his life there seems to be no authentic record. His schoolfellows, with the exception of his reviewer in the Quarterly, appear to have preserved no recollections of him, and we are told that in after life he never mentioned them: that he had even forgotten their names. At Eton he appears to have acquired a taste for boating, which was one of his greatest enjoyments through life. We did not. The English lawyer's blue His school education ended in 1809, and books are the numbers of the Law and in the winter of that year Medwin and he Equity Reports with which every term op- were a good deal together at the house of presses him, and which are becoming each Shelley's father. They wrote novels and day a more serious grievance. The states- poems, from which Medwin gives large exman's blue books are those desperate piles of tracts; among others, a poem called the lumber in which are contained the wisdom" Wandering Jew," which they sent to of Parliamentary committees and royal Campbell. He good-naturedly read it, commissioners, and of every person who and, with pardonable dishonesty, told them wishes to enlighten the nation on the thou- there were two good lines in it, sand topics which are for ever investigated, and still remain as obscure as before. But the Brentford schoolboy's blue books are not the blue books of the statesman or the lawyer, "It seemed as if an angel's sigh Had breathed the plaintive symphony." These were the two lines which Campbell praised. If we sought to reverse his say, "Bad are the best," it is decision, and probable that the Captain might come down on us as he did on the Brentford schoolmaster, and prove that he had stolen them from Scott. "Who does not," says our comic Plutarch, "know what blue books mean? But if there should be any one ignorant enough not to know what those dear dusky 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, Shelley's favourite poet in 1809," says Medand other grim personages-a most exciting and win, "was Southey. He had read Thalaba till interesting sort of food for boys' minds. Among he almost knew it by heart, and had drenched those of a larger calibre was one which I have himself with its metrical beauty. never seen since, but which I remember with a recouché delight. It was Peter Wilkins.' How much Shelley wished for a winged wife, and winged little cherubs of children!"-MEDWIN, vol. i., p. 29. To these treasures were added the stores of the Brentford circulating library. Mrs. Radcliffe's romances and novels of the Rosa-Matilda school, among which Medwin mentions the name of one in which the devil was the hero-"Zofloya the Moor"were Shelley's great delight. Shelley believed in ghosts, and was known, once at least, to have walked in his sleep. He was "I have often heard him quote that exquisite passage, where the Enchantress winds round the finger of her victim a single hair, till the spell becomes inextricable-the charm cannot be broken. "He found a woman in the cave- Who by the fire was spinning, Was finer than the silkworm's- The song she sung was low and sweet; And round and round his right hand, to end made up. In one of Miss Edge- the coin is found; but one of a later date than that of the supposed execution of the deed. Now, Mr. Medwin is as anxious as Miss Edgeworth's witness to prove these conversations. He takes especial care to tell you that he transcribes from his recollection; that he has never read the poem or romance, as he calls it, since; and his mis-spelling the witch's name, and Kehama's too, for that matter, prevents our entertaining the slightest doubt of the accuracy of his statement that he had never read the book, or could in this way have confused in his memory the incidents of one period with those of another. He has a thousand reasons to remember the thing; and yet what he has stated is not--cannot be the fact. Break the seal--the coin is of a later date. "Kehama was not published for years after the supposed conversation! For The only possible object of recording Shelley's early life is that of tracing the unusually early development of his powers; and the value of any part of the record is destroyed by proofs, such as this accident furnishes, that Medwin has composed his book from obscure recollections, in which time, place, and person are confused. our own part, we think there is almost decisive evidence in Shelley's writings of his not having, at this period, even seen "Thalaba," with "the metrical beauty of which" he is said to have already" drenched" himThat Medwin should have forgotten the self. The earliest works of a boy almost passage, and substituted some general re- necessarily exhibit close imitations of whatcollection for what he had heard Shelley ever he most admires. Shelley at this repeat, is not surprising; but it is surpris- period wrote two novels, both very dull; ing that any one can place the slightest re- but in one of them are several poems, in liance on the record of conversations pre- which the cadences of the verse, and the served by a memory so little retentive of forms of language, recall Beattie's Hermit, anything worth remembering. We have, Scott's Ballads, and Monk Lewis's, but in however, to make another remark on the which there is not a single line or thought passage that we have just cited, which that for a moment brings to the mind the makes us utterly discard, for any purpose, poem which Medwin says he was then peranything whatever that is stated on no bet-petually repeating, and which we know, in ter authority than the kind of gossip of a few years after, so possessed his imaginawhich this very poor book is from beginning tion as to have furnished the key-note to |