So much has been written in the ways of sycophancy or vaingloriousness about Shelley’s Norman descent and aristocratic quality, it is necessary to glance at some of the facts of his ancestral story.

The poet’s friend, from the time when they were schoolfellows at Brentford, Thomas Medwin the Younger, was also the poet’s kinsman—his third cousin, through Sir Bysshe Shelley’s marriage with Mary Catherine Michell, and his second cousin, through Sir Timothy Shelley’s marriage with Elizabeth Pilford. It might have been supposed that a biographer, thus related to Shelley by blood and friendship, would know the prime facts of his friend’s pedigree, and state them without egregious error. But poor Tom Medwin was not remarkable for accuracy.

To rely in this affair on the whilom littérateur and cavalry officer, is to believe that the poet was a lineal descendant of Sir John Shelley of Maresfield Park, who was created a baronet in 1611; to believe that this Sir John Shelley’s son (William) was a Justice of the Common Pleas; and to believe that the poet’s great-grandfather (Timothy Shelley, of Fen Place, Co. Sussex) was a lineal descendant, in the ninth descent, of the aforesaid baronet of James the First’s time. ‘I will only say,’ Medwin remarks lightly, ‘that Sir John Shelley, of Maresfield Park, who dated his Baronetage from the earliest creation of that title in 1611, had besides other issue, two sons, Sir William, a Judge of the Common Pleas, and Edward; from the latter of whom, in the seventh descent, sprung Timothy, who also had two sons, and settled—having married an American lady—at Christ’s Church, Newark, in North America.’

Medwin is wrong in all the really important allegations of the brief statement. Sir John Shelley of Michelgrove (the baronet referred to) had two sons; but neither of them was named Edward; neither of them became a Justice of the Common Pleas; neither of them was in any way or degree accountable for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s appearance on the earth’s surface. The poet was no more descended from Sir John Shelley, the first of the Michelgrove baronets, than he was descended from the man in the moon. How could the poet’s great-grandfather (Timothy, born in 1700 A.D.) be the eighth in descent from the first Michelgrove baronet, the seventh in descent from either of the baronet’s sons? Human generations do not come and go at the rate of seven to a century.

To pass for a moment from Tom Medwin (of whose egregious mis-statements something more must be said) to the present Lady Shelley, the poet’s daughter-in-law. ‘At the close of the last century,’ says this lady in her Shelley Memorials: from Authentic Sources, ‘the family of the Shelleys had long held a high position among the large landholders of Sussex. Fortunate marriages in two generations preceding the birth of the poet considerably increased the wealth and influence of the house, the head of which was a staunch Whig.’ Lady Shelley’s book from authentic sources contains several statements of no authenticity. For each of the principal statements of the above-quoted words, she had, however, good authority. But instead of coming to her from a single authentic source, the facts embodied in the quotation were drawn from two different authentic sources, the archives of the Michelgrove Shelleys, and the archives of the Castle Goring Shelleys; and by cleverly combining the two sets of facts, Lady Shelley conveys to her readers a very erroneous impression respecting the condition of the poet’s seventeenth-century ancestors. Unquestionably, the Sussex Shelleys, at the close of the eighteenth century, had long held a high position among the large landowners of the county. But these fortunate Shelleys were not the family of which the poet was the brightest ornament. They were the Michelgrove Shelleys; whereas the poet came of people, differing greatly from the Michelgrove people in social quality. He was of the Castle Goring Shelleys—a family that, instead of being merely enriched, was created and established by the fortunate marriages to which Lady Shelley refers. Before the first of those marriages, wedlock had done much for the advantage of these inferior Shelleys. For instance, the marriage, in 1692, of John Shelley, of Fen Place, jure uxoris, with Helen, co-heir of Roger Bysshe, of Fen Place, Co. Sussex, had reclaimed the poet’s direct male ancestors from a state of territorial vagrancy, and given them a permanent, though modest, abiding-place. But for a considerable period after that marriage, the direct ancestral precursors of the Castle Goring Shelleys were no such house as the readers of Lady Shelley’s book are likely to imagine. The Michelgrove Shelleys were one ‘house,’ the Castle Goring Shelleys were quite another house; though it has for some time been the fashion of biographers to mix the two houses, and speak of them by turns as one house, or as branches of the same house. The Michelgrove Shelleys were an ancient house. The Castle Goring Shelleys were a mushroom family, disdainfully regarded by the Michelgrove people, at the opening of the nineteenth century.

Something more must be said of the older of these houses. The Michelgrove Shelleys are said, for reasons no longer discoverable, to have entered the country with the Conqueror. They may have done so. There is better evidence that they had lands in Kent in the times of Edward I. and Edward II., before they established themselves in Sussex; and still better testimony, that one of the clan (John Shelley) was Member of Parliament for Rye from 1415 to 1428. With this parliamentary personage, the house, or rather the family from which the house proceeded, comes into the clear light of history. Two long generations later (generations so lengthy that one has reason to suspect a failure of the record) the house acquired a dignity, which gave it an enduring place amongst the historic families of the realm.

Bred to the law, William Shelley (the grandson, or maybe the great-grandson, of the afore-mentioned Member for Rye) became Reader of the Inner Temple in 1517, and after holding successively the office of a Judge of the Sheriff’s Court and the office of Recorder of the City of London, rose to be a Judge of the Common Pleas somewhere about the beginning of 1527. Before mounting to this eminence he had represented the City in Parliament, and practised for six years as a Serjeant-at-law in Westminster Hall. Those who know Cavendish’s Wolsey do not need to be reminded of the part taken by this fortunate lawyer in the negotiations that closed with the Cardinal’s surrender of York House to Henry the Eighth. ‘Tell his Highness,’ said the fallen Cardinal to the Judge of the Common Pleas, ‘that I am his most faithful subject and obedient beadsman, whose command I will in no wise disobey; but will in all things fulfil his pleasure, as you the father of the law say I may. I therefore charge your conscience to discharge me, and show His Highness from me that I must desire His Majesty to remember there is both heaven and hell;’ a message which the judge probably forgot to deliver, as he lived to entertain the King at Michelgrove, and was continued in his office till Henry’s death. Surviving the sovereign, whom he served on the bench of the Common Pleas for twenty years, Sir William Shelley served Edward the Sixth in the same capacity, to the day of his own death, which occurred between November 3, 1548 (the date of his last fine), and May 10, 1549, the date of his successor’s appointment.

Fortunate in his professional career, Sir William Shelley was no less fortunate in his domestic affairs. Marrying an heiress, he had, with other children, John, the grandfather of the first Michelgrove baronet, and Sir Richard Shelley, the last English Prior of St. John of Jerusalem.

Not much less than a century wrong in assigning the legal eminence of Henry the Eighth’s judge to the eldest son of James the First’s baronet, Medwin wrote under a general impression that the Shelleys to whom he was related, had somehow or other descended from the Michelgrove house, an impression which the poet seems also to have cherished, and imparted to his college-friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who writes in serio-comic vein of Sir Guyon de Shelley and Sir Richard Shelley (the Knight of Malta), as though the Grand Prior of the sixteenth century and the Paladin with the three conchs were veritable forefathers of the Castle Goring Shelleys.

That these Shelleys of the junior house were no family of singular antiquity or overpowering dignity, is shown by the pedigree of Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in the first volume of Mr. Forman’s edition of the poet’s prose works. A pedigree of only nine generations, beginning with mention of Henry Shelley, of Worminghurst, Co. Sussex, who died in 1623, this evidential writing puts it beyond question that the poet, of whose ancestral grandeur so much has been written, was no man of noble or otherwise splendid lineage; puts it beyond question, that whether regard be had to the number of its generations, the antiquity of the earliest dates, or the importance of the persons commemorated in its entries, it is (from the date of Henry Shelley’s death temp. James I. to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s birth in 1792) nothing more than such a pedigree as could be displayed by the majority of the gentle families of the middle way of English life, who never for a moment think of rating themselves as families of patrician worth.

One or two rather awkward matters excepted, this pedigree is a fair and honest record of the births, marriages, and deaths, of nine successive generations of gentle people; but as an exhibition of familiar grandeur, it is no more impressive than any pedigree one would regard as a matter of course in the muniment room of a country gentleman, tracing his descent from a gentle yeoman of the Elizabethan period. It mentions eight of the poet’s forefathers in the direct right line. Describing some of these eight individuals as ‘esquires,’ and some of them as ‘gentlemen,’ the record shows that no one of them bore any hereditary honour, or even the dignity of knighthood before the poet’s birth. It shows that no one of them married a woman of higher quality than the degree of a simple gentlewoman. Doubtless they were (with a single exception) gentlewomen in the heraldic sense of the term,—daughters of gentlemen bearing arms,—but to use an old-world phrase, no one of them was ‘a woman of quality.’ The record shows, that at the time of the poet’s birth, no one of his eight male ancestors in the direct right line had served the State with distinction, won a foremost place in one of the learned professions, or attained to any social eminence higher than a place in a Commission of the Peace.

Such is the evidence of the document of which Mr. Forman justly remarks, ‘the pedigree speaks for itself to any careful reader.’ And this evidence is the more impressive, because the carefully elaborated record is the pedigree deposited at the Heralds’ College on 6th March, 1816, by Mr. John Shelley Sidney (the poet’s uncle by the half-blood), at a moment when he was especially desirous of figuring to the best possible advantage in the esteem of heralds and their employers. Regard being had to this gentleman’s character and social ambition, and his pride in his descent from the Sidneys, it cannot be questioned that he made his genealogical record showy and impressive to the utmost of his ability,—that he would fain have driven it back another generation,—that could he have demonstrated a connection between the Castle Goring and Michelgrove Shelleys, he would not have omitted to prove them two branches of the same tree.

Mr. John Shelley Sidney’s forbearance from pushing the genealogical record a single stage backwards beyond the certain evidences, is the more noteworthy and creditable, because he can scarcely have been ignorant of the inconclusive, though by no means inconsiderable, testimony that the Henry Shelley, who died at Worminghurst in 1623, was the grandson of Edward Shelley of the said parish, and that this Edward Shelley was the younger brother of the Judge of the Common Pleas, who was the actual founder of the Michelgrove family.

What are the inconclusive, though considerable, evidences of this descent of the Castle Goring Shelleys and the Michelgrove Shelleys from a common ancestor, John Shelley, the judge’s father? A manuscript, in the possession of the present Sir Percy Shelley, bears witness that the Henry Shelley, of Worminghurst, mentioned in the first entry of the pedigree (deposited by Mr., afterwards Sir John Shelley Sidney in the Heralds’ College), was the son of Henry Shelley of the same parish. Consequently, if reliance may be placed on this manuscript, the most ancient of the male ancestors in the right line, from whom Mr. John Shelley Sidney traced his descent, was preceded by his father at Worminghurst, a fact carrying the poet’s lineage another generation backwards, into the closing term of the Tudor period. There is, moreover, in the chancel of Worminghurst Church, a brass, of sixteenth century workmanship, to the memory of Edward Shelley, Esq., one of the four masters of the royal household, in the successive reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, and Mary Tudor. There are grounds for believing that this Edward Shelley was a son of John Shelley, of Michelgrove, and younger brother of Sir William Shelley, Justice of the Common Pleas. The archives of the Michelgrove Shelleys certify that Sir William Shelley, the judge of the Common Pleas, had a younger brother named Edward. That the poet’s certain male ancestors in the right line bore the same arms as the Michelgrove Shelleys in the seventeenth century, that vigilant heralds permitted them to bear those arms, and that no baronet of the Michelgrove Shelleys ever questioned their right to bear those arms, are noteworthy pieces of testimony that the two families came from the same source. In the absence of positive evidence of the fact, it cannot be denied that Sir Bernard Burke had sufficient presumptive testimony, to warrant him in recording that the poet was a lineal descendant of Edward Shelley, the judge’s younger brother. There is also fair presumptive testimony that the judge’s younger brother Edward was the Edward Shelley, who held office as one of the Masters of Henry the Eighth’s household, and found his grave in Worminghurst. Such evidence would not be sufficient to establish a claim to a dormant peerage, or to the reversion of a great estate; but it is sufficient for the purpose of Shelley’s personal historian.

‘The house,’ which Lady Shelley regards as having been merely enriched by the fortunate marriages that created it, was a curiously vagrant family for a house ‘holding a high position among the large landholders of Sussex.’ Leaving Worminghurst, Co. Sussex, on the demise of Henry Shelley (‘esq.,’ as he is described in the official pedigree), who died there in 1623, the house moved to Ichingfield, in the time of Richard Shelley (‘gent.,’ as he is modestly defined in the same genealogical chart). Under the government of John Shelley, ‘esq.,’ who died in 1673, the house rested at Thakeham, whence it migrated to Fen Place, in the parish of Worth, Co. Sussex, on the marriage, in 1692, of John Shelley (of Fen Place, jure uxoris, Co. Sussex, esq.), with Hellen, younger of the two daughters and co-heirs of Roger Bysshe, of Fen Place, aforesaid. Of the eight children of this marriage, the reader of the present work is invited to take notice of no more than two, John Shelley, the second, and Timothy Shelley, the third son. Born at Worth in 1696, this last-named John Shelley, who died in 1772 at Uckfield, is handed down to all future time by the pedigree as ‘an esquire and lunatic.’ That there was a strain of insanity in the Castle-Goring Shelleys is a matter to be borne in mind by those who are interested in the poet and his nearest kindred. Percy Bysshe was great-great-nephew of this lunatic, and great-grandson of the lunatic’s brother, Timothy, of whom further mention must be made.

Born at Worth, in April 1700, the third son, and fifth child, of a petty squireen, who lived to have nine children to set going in the world, Timothy, on coming to man’s estate, emigrated to the American plantations, with a slender purse and an abundant store of physical energy. It is probable that he also carried across the Atlantic some knowledge of medicine and surgery, acquired during an apprenticeship to a country apothecary. As there is no evidence that he passed, or tried to pass, an examination at the Apothecaries’ Hall, or Surgeons’ Hall, nor any evidence that the adventurer underwent any medical training before he crossed the Atlantic, Medwin may have been right in believing that he fought life’s battle in the New World as ‘a quack doctor.’ It should, however, be borne in mind that, if he had served an apprenticeship to a Sussex apothecary, this Timothy would have possessed all the legal qualification to kill and cure, that was required of provincial apothecaries in the mother country prior to the Medical Act of 1814. Anyhow, with or without qualification, the adventurer established himself as a medicine man, and with quackery, or without it, throve in his adopted calling. Practising at Christ’s Church, Newark, he married a widow with money. In this last particular he held firmly to the main article of Shelleyan worldly wisdom. The poet’s ancestors may have married for love, but they usually required a substantial compensation for the loss of celibatic freedom. The widow to whom Timothy surrendered himself was the widow of a New York miller, named Plum; and it is believed that her purse satisfied the hopes planted in her admirer’s breast by so suggestive a name. Marrying thus prudently, Timothy Shelley, of Newark, became the father of his first-born son, John Shelley, on the 10th of December, 1729, and of his second son, Bysshe Shelley (the first of the Castle Goring baronets), on the 21st of June, 1731.

It is doubtful when Timothy of Newark returned to England, where his father died in 1739, after surviving his eldest and issueless son by some six years. He may have sailed ‘for home,’ on news coming to him in Newark of his father’s death. That he became the actual chief of the family on his father’s demise may be inferred from the fact that he is styled in the pedigree his father’s ‘heir.’ After setting his English affairs in order, he may have returned to America for awhile. It is more probable, however, that, returning to England with his two boys, when the elder of them was some ten, and the younger some eight years old, he was content to play the part of a modest Sussex squireen to the day of his death. Anyhow it is certain the equally adventurous and fortunate apothecary (or ‘quack doctor,’ if any reader prefers Tom Medwin’s word) was the squire of Fen Place for a considerable term of years, before he was coffined, and put under the floor of Warnham Church, in 1770, some two years and six months before the death of his elder and lunatic brother.

What became of this fortunate apothecary’s two sons, John (the elder) and Bysshe (the younger)? Becoming the head of ‘the House’ on his father’s demise in 1770, the apothecary’s elder son married the daughter of a Sussex gentleman, led a comparatively uneventful life at Field Place, near Horsham, and dying childless in 1790, was buried in Warnham Church; being succeeded by his younger brother, a man far superior to him in address and energy, if not in benevolence and piety. Planted by the petty squireen, who took possession of Roger Bysshe’s daughter and home, and watered by the apothecary who had followed fortune, and found money in America, the family that gave England her brightest, and sweetest, and most passionate lyric poet, was raised to the dignity of a house, by the craft, greed, and penuriousness of Bysshe Shelley, the first baronet of Castle Goring.

The several excellent writers, who have been misled on the matter by Medwin, the Misleader, may take the present writer’s assurance that the gentleman, who won a baronetcy in his old age, never ‘exercised the profession of a quack doctor’ in America. There is, however, sufficient evidence that the Newark apothecary’s younger son was designed to follow his father’s calling. In his sordid and eccentric old age, when the lord of Castle Goring inhabited a small house hard by his favourite tap-room in Horsham, it was generally believed that he had at one time practised medicine in London. It may also be put upon the present record, that he was believed to have been a partner in the professional activities of Dr. James Graham, the notorious mesmeric charlatan, in whose Temple of Health the fair and frail Emma Harte officiated as the Goddess Hygeia, before she became Sir William Hamilton’s wife and Nelson’s mistress. Percy Bysshe, the poet, told Hogg, that his grandfather supplied the money which enabled Graham to set up his preposterous purple chariot. Percy’s statements, however, should be regarded suspiciously, when they tend to the discredit of his sire and grandsire.

Whatever the means he used for making money, it is certain that the man, who in his old age was remarkable for the stateliness of his presence, and in his milder moods for the courtesy of manner, possessed in his youth no ordinary charms of appearance and address. Tall, even as his famous grandson, and qualified by his blue eyes and brown curls to captivate heedless womankind, he had not crossed the threshold of manly estate, when he found favour in the eyes of Miss Mary Catherine Michell, only child and heir of the late Reverend Theobald Michell, clk., formerly of Horsham. The young lady (only eighteen years old) having considerable possessions, it is probable that her guardians thought she could do better for herself than marry the boyish medical student, who was only the younger son of the squire and whilom apothecary of Fen Place. Possibly they only expressed a strong opinion, that the young man should wait awhile, and thereby avoid the evils of precipitate wedlock. Possibly they had no opportunity of expressing an opinion on the matter, until remonstrance would have been out of time. To the young people it appeared a case for elopement and irregular marriage; and, acting on this romantic view of their position, they hastened to town and were married in 1752, at Keith’s Chapel, Mayfair (the fashionable place for Fleet marriages done in the west end of the town). From Keith’s Chapel they hastened to Paris, where the bride fell ill of small-pox, and narrowly escaped the death that would have made Tom Medwin’s mother the heir of the late Rev. Theobald Michell’s estate. Eight years later, the lady died after giving birth to three children, and Mr. Bysshe Shelley was at liberty to look out for a second heiress willing to become his wife. The only son of this marriage was Timothy Shelley, the poet’s father, who became M.P. for New Shoreham, Co. Sussex.

Nine years after his first wife’s death, Mr. Bysshe Shelley fixed his affections on another heiress—the heiress of an historic line and an historic estate—Miss Elizabeth Jane Sidney Perry, only daughter and heir of William Perry, Esq., of Turvill Park, Bucks, Wormington, Co. Gloucester, and Penshurst Place, Co. Kent. It is remarkable that an heiress of so bright a lineage and so noble an estate—an heiress who, in descent and fortune, was a fit match for an earl—an heiress lineally descended from the Sidneys, Earls of Leicester—should have lived in singleness to her twenty-ninth year. Perhaps this remarkable fact gave the younger son of the Newark apothecary the requisite courage for a daring exploit.

Thirty-eight years old, he was no longer young when he first conceived the purpose of winning so notable an heiress. But though well on in middle age, he had the figure, and face, and audacity, of a youngster. Taking up a position, suitable for his purpose, in a little inn near the Park, celebrated by Jonson’s verse, and glorified by the loves of Waller and Saccharissa, he crossed the lady’s path in her walks, regarded her worshipfully when she attended the services of Penshurst Church, knelt to her beneath the spreading branches of ‘the Lady’s Oak.’ Is it marvellous that a suitor, so eager and vigilant, so comely and daring, achieved his purpose, notwithstanding the disadvantages of inferior station and growing years? Is it wonderful that the gentlewoman eloped with the suitor, who valued her far more for her broad acres than her descent from the Sidneys? Whatever the motives to the suit, Mr. Bysshe Shelley won, in gallant fashion, the lady by whom he had his second lot of children,—five sons and two daughters.

In the year following this marriage, the Newark apothecary was entombed in Warnham Church; and eleven years later (May 1781) Mr. Bysshe Shelley again found himself a widower when he was still in his fiftieth year. Henceforth he devoted himself chiefly to the pursuit of money,—a pursuit in which he was favoured by the death of his childless brother in 1790, when he succeeded to the Fen Place and Field Place estates.

The family having come to his hands, he made ‘a House’ of it. In 1806,—when his little grandson, the future poet, was on the point of going to Eton,—Mr. Bysshe Shelley became Sir Bysshe Shelley, baronet, of Castle Goring; the dignity being the price, with which the Duke of Norfolk rewarded him for former electioneering service, and prepaid him for similar service to be rendered to the Howards and the Whig party to the end of his days. At the date of this social promotion, Sir Bysshe Shelley had already begun to build the egregious Castle which he never finished, though he is said, by the unreliable Medwin, to have spent 80,000l. upon it.

If he ever hoped for happiness in his later time, the hope was disappointed. After he had married his daughters, and sent his sons into life, the passion for money, which had long overpowered the other forces of his nature, developed even to miserly madness. In other respects the strain of insanity, that had given him a lunatic for an uncle, displayed itself in his manifold eccentricities. Living at Horsham, in a little house, and finding his most congenial associates in the tap-rooms of the Horsham taverns, whilst his grandson went to school at Brentford and Eton, the founder of the Castle Goring Shelleys disliked his son so cordially, that he is said to have seldom greeted him without an outbreak of passionate malevolence. Percy, the future poet, used to entertain his comrades at Eton by cursing his absent sire; and at Oxford, he assured Hogg, that he had acquired this singular taste for cursing his father behind his back, from hearing old Sir Bysshe curse him to his face. It was thus that this chief of the Castle Goring Shelleys lived from the creation of his baronetcy in 1806 to his death in 1815, when he left vast wealth in money and lands, In Trust, for the creation of the big entailed estate, that should perpetuate the grandeur of ‘the House’ he had laboured so resolutely to found. Medwin (no safe authority on details) says the old man left to his descendants 300,000l. in the English funds, and landed estates yielding a yearly revenue of 20,000l., besides the banknotes to the amount of 10,000l. that were hidden in the books and other furniture of the room, where he drew and yielded his last breath.

Another thing to be noticed in the evidences of this family is the testimony to the newness of its grandeur, that may be gathered from the records of its territorial possessions. Fen Place came to these Shelleys, through the wedding-ring, so recently as the last decade of the seventeenth century. They acquired Field Place by purchase in the earlier half of the following (the eighteenth) century. For their place ‘among the large landholders of Sussex,’ they are mainly indebted to the Newark apothecary’s younger son, who flourished in George the Third’s time, and died only a few months before the battle of Waterloo.

To take a true view of the poet’s lineage and ancestral quality, the reader must bear in mind the distinctness of the Michelgrove Shelleys and the Castle Goring Shelleys,—a distinctness that would not be affected by the production of positive and indisputable evidence, that the two families had for their common progenitor, a gentle yeoman of Henry the Eighth’s time. Should this remote connexion of the two families ever be put beyond question, it would be none the less true that, instead of being of aristocratic descent, as so many biographers have asserted, the poet came of a line of forefathers who were nothing more than ‘gentle yeomen’ till the later time of George III. The poet was no lineal descendant of the Justice of the Common Pleas, who may be fairly styled the founder of the Michelgrove House. From the date of that slightly historic personage, the Michelgrove family was a knightly house. Baronets from the creation of the order, they intermarried with knightly and noble houses before and after 1611, drawing to their veins the blood of the Belknaps, FitzWilliamses, Sackvilles, Lovells, Reresbys, Vantelets, and Nevills. On the other hand, from the earliest date of his genealogical record, the poet’s ancestors were mere gentle yeomen, intermarrying with families of no higher gentility, till the poet’s grandfather carried off the heiress of the Penshurst Sidneys.

As no drop of Sidney blood came to his veins from his grandfather’s second marriage, and as his kindred of the half-blood at Penshurst were not over-fond of their half-cousins at Field Place, it is scarcely conceivable the poet was so proud of his connexion with the Sidneys as Medwin represents. It may, however, have been so. For with all his vaunted superiority to aristocratic prejudice, and all his sincere hostility to aristocratic privilege, Shelley was by no means exempt from the weakness, which disposed Byron in his vainer moods to think too much of his nobility. The advocate of republican ideas, the apostle of freedom and equality, he was sometimes curiously careful to remind his admirers that he was no demagogue of vulgar origin, but resembled the Lionel of Rosalind and Helen, in being the heir to ‘great wealth and lineage high.’ When this humour prevailed within him, it is possible that he sometimes looked away from the father whom he hated, the grandsire he despised, the obscure yeomen whom he distasted, and could persuade himself that, like his half-cousins at Penshurst, he, too, had somehow or other descended from the Sidneys. But no such innocent exercise of fancy would touch the facts or qualify the complexion of his genealogy. It is nothing to the poet’s dishonour to say that, though better born than Shakespeare, he was no more fortunate in his ancestral story than the majority—or, at least, a large minority of English gentlemen, moving in the middle ways of gentle life.

CHAPTER III.

The Shelleyan enthusiasts have little charity for the poet’s sire, even the most discreet of them regarding him as a deplorably inconvenient father for so marvellous a son. It is not clear what kind of father would have won Percy’s filial loyalty. In fairness to this sire, it should be remembered that, if he was not the right kind of father for the poet, he proved an excellent father to all his other children; and that, if the poet should have had a more congenial father, Squire Timothy could not well have had a more trying son than the boy of latent genius, who lived to cover his house with glory.

After keeping his terms at the same Oxford College, from which his son was expelled in the following century, Mr. Timothy Shelley made ‘the grand tour,’ returning in due course with a smattering of French, an extremely bad picture of the Eruption of Vesuvius, and ‘a certain air’ (if Medwin may be trusted) of having seen the world. Having surveyed mankind in European capitals, and entered middle age, he married Miss Elizabeth Pilfold, a gentlewoman of good family and great beauty, who is lightly regarded by the Shelleyan enthusiasts, because, in the conflict of her husband and her son, she held loyally to the former, and declined to be the partisan of the latter. It has even been urged to this lady’s discredit that, when her wilful boy would fain have shaken his sister’s confidence in the doctrines of the Church of England, she, in her mental narrowness, was alarmed for the spiritual safety of her girls, and thought it well that at least for a time they should be guarded from his influence.

Had these parents foreseen the trouble that would come to them from their first-born child, they would have welcomed him coldly on his arrival in the room (at Field Place), one of whose walls has in recent time been illustrated with this inscription:—

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
WAS BORN IN THIS CHAMBER
AUGUST 4TH, 1792.
SHRINE OF THE DAWNING SPEECH AND THOUGHT
OF SHELLEY SACRED BE
TO ALL WHO BOW WHERE TIME HAS BROUGHT
GIFTS TO ETERNITY.

Of Shelley, the little fellow of Dr. Greenlaw’s school at Brentford, we know much from Tom Medwin’s occasionally accurate pages, and from other sources of information, which enable us to check the statements of that more entertaining than reliable biographer. Respecting Shelley at Eton, there is almost a redundance of evidence. Of the Etonian’s ways of amusing himself at Field Place during his holidays, there is no lack of information;—thanks to Miss Hellen Shelley’s goodness in committing all she could remember of her brother to paper, for the assistance of his biographer and fellow-collegian, Hogg, the cynical humourist and clever lawyer. But of Shelley, the nursling of the Field Place nursery, and child of the Field Place schoolroom, few facts are on the record;—scarcely anything besides the three or four matters, which Miss Hellen placed amongst her personal recollections, as matters of domestic tradition, coming to her from times before she was of an age to take clear and enduring cognizance of her brother’s doings.

Seven years his junior, the lady, plying her pen in 1856 (four-and-thirty years after his death), can scarcely have retained any clear memories of him, from a time previous to the opening of her ninth year. Barely seven years old, when her brother went for the first time to Eton, she had in 1856 a memory of uncommon retentiveness, if it afforded her a clear picture of him, as he appeared during the first of his Eton holidays. Fortunately, however, she touches on affairs and incidents of an earlier date; such, for instance, as his visits to the Warnham Vicar, who taught him the rudiments of Latin, visits that began when he was only six years old, and she was still unborn. To this gentle and delightful chronicler, speaking for the moment from memory of her mother’s gossip, we are indebted for our knowledge of the astonishment little Bysshe (whilst a Latin scholar at the Vicar’s school) caused the elders of Field Place, by repeating aloud, word for word, and without an error, Gray’s lines on the Cat and the Gold Fish, after a single reading of the composition.

Without precisely declaring herself indebted to hearsay for the story, Miss Hellen seems to be speaking of a matter anterior to the earliest of her personal observations, when she gives us the particulars of the marvellous ‘invention’ with which Percy in his tender childhood entertained and perplexed the people of his home. The essay in romantic fiction was this: Assuring his sisters (Hellen’s elder sisters) that he had just returned from paying a visit to certain ladies of their village, he recounted to them, minutely, how the ladies received him, how they occupied themselves during his visit, and more particularly how he and they wandered through a delightful garden, well known to the boy’s auditors for its filbert bank and undulating turf bank. On inquiry, it was found that the imaginative urchin had not been to the ladies, their house, or their garden. The whole statement was made up of fibs; ‘but’ (says the recorder of the characteristic incident) ‘it was not considered as a falsehood to be punished.’ Perhaps it would have been better in the long run for little Bysshe, had a less lenient view been taken of the affair that, if not the first, was one of the earliest of those countless deviations from strict historical veracity, which have occasioned so much controversy between his extravagant idolaters and his temperate admirers.

Of the droll things written of the poet by his enthusiastic worshipers, few are droller than the pages in which this exercise of childish fancy is dealt with, as an early exhibition of the peculiar genius that placed him eventually in the highest rank of imaginative artists. Had they not been too engrossed with the affairs of their own home to take nice cognizance of their neighbours’ children, the elders of Field Place, whilst rightly regarding the fib as no flagrant offence, would not have ‘mentioned it as a singular fact.’ To those who are familiar with the ways and humours of children, it is needless to say, that little Bysshe’s ‘invention’ is an example of the commonest kind of the harmless fibs, that come from the proverbially truthful mouths of babes and sucklings. Poets would be unendurably abundant, if all the little boys and girls, who ‘romance’ in this innocent fashion, were destined for the service of the Muses.

In Shelley’s case, however, the story has an exceptional interest, because he never survived the disposition, which thus early in his career caused him to proclaim himself the recipient of civilities that had not been offered to him,—the graceful actor in a domestic drama that had not been performed. All through life, Shelley had a practice of uttering for the truth statements that were not true. All through life, his familiar friends received his communications, with reference to this propensity. Out of their affection for the man, they palliated the weakness with more or less sincere excuses, that relieved the infirmity of the odium of deceitfulness. Some of his friends called attention to the poetical verity, underlying the least veracious statements; others persuaded themselves that the speaker of untruths was the victim of an inordinately powerful imagination. Others, unable to shut their eyes to the sure indications that he was not altogether unaware of the fictitious nature of his statements, maintained that the fables were due partly to hallucination, and only in some degree to wilful inventiveness. Whilst Hogg talked of the poetic verity of the egregious fictions, and of their utterer’s inordinately powerful imagination, Peacock originated the theory of ‘semi-delusion.’

From the few glimpses to be had of him in Miss Hellen Shelley’s letters, and Medwin’s reminiscences, and from bits of testimony which, though found in records of his later boyhood, are evidential to certain particulars of his earlier infancy, the cautious historian can produce the principal characteristics of the little fellow, who used to play with his sisters in the Field Place gardens, and ride on his pony about the Warnham lanes, in years anterior to his first departure from home for boarding-school. It is manifest that the child, who from his seventh to his eleventh year went daily to the Warnham Vicar for instruction in Latin, and received his other lessons in his sisters’ schoolroom, may be thought of as a shy, nervous, timid, small-headed urchin; tall for his years, but delicately fashioned. Narrow-chested and slightly round-shouldered, he had the look of a little fellow, scarcely strong enough to enjoy the sports of robust children. A slight slip of a lad, more given to loitering than running about the Field Place gardens; more often seen sitting by the fire, than dancing on the carpet of his sisters’ play-room; he was gentle in his happier moods with a girlish gentleness, and sometimes fretful with a girlish fretfulness. Deficient in boyishness, the boy had a face, chiefly remarkable for the fawn-like prominence of its deep blue eyes, the delicate, though imperfect, shapeliness of its mouth, the rather comical meanness of its little tip-tilted nose, and the red-and-white of its singularly bright complexion; the general girlishness of his appearance being heightened by the profusion of the silky hair, falling and flowing in blond-brown ringlets about his long neck and weedy shoulders.

Years later, musing on his conception of his former self, when he preferred the society of his little sister to the company of the rough boys of the Vicar’s schoolroom, Shelley wrote in Rosalind and Helen, of Helen’s docile child:—

‘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 would stir
Its marble calm.’

In like manner, ‘Abdallah’ and ‘Maimuna’ (the little Bysshe and Bessie of The Assassins) used to float their toy-boats upon the water of their smiling creek. Shelley’s delight in toy-flotillas may have arisen for the first time (as some of his biographers aver) long after his childhood. Possibly he was the fool of his own fancy in thinking he cared to play with toy-boats in his infancy. It is, however, certain, that gentleness characterized the child, who, on attaining manhood, meditated complacently on the delight he took in gentle sports when he was a gentle boy.

From what has been said of the facial show of the little fellow, who used to play in the Field Place gardens, and ride his Shetland pony about the Warnham lanes, in the closing years of the last, and the opening summers of the present century, it follows that the picture published by Mr. Colnaghi, in 1879, as a veritable portraiture of Shelley in his childhood, is an unauthentic and delusive performance. An exquisite example of childish beauty, the little boy of Mr. Colnaghi’s engraving has a straight, finely-pointed nose, and a face of faultless symmetry; a nose that could not have developed into the distinctly tip-tilted nose of the poet’s later visage; a face, that could not have departed so far from its normal mould, as in later time to bear any resemblance to the poet’s countenance, which is represented by all the several persons of his familiar acquaintance, who wrote about it, as having been no less wanting in symmetry than fortunate in the charms of expressiveness. Whilst declaring the singular comeliness of the poet’s face in its happier moments, Hogg records that its ‘features were not symmetrical.’ Medwin, ever quick to glorify his cousin, admits that his features were ‘not regularly handsome.’ Though she busied herself to impose upon the world the picture of a beautifully symmetrical face as Shelley’s veritable semblance, and was even more accountable than Mrs. Shelley for the prevailing misconceptions respecting his facial aspect, Mrs. Hogg (the Mrs. Williams of Shelleyan annals) admitted to Mr. Rossetti, in Trelawny’s presence, on March 13, 1872, that the poet ‘could not be called handsome or beautiful, though the character of his face was so remarkable for ideality and expression;’ the lady, at the same time, confirming what Hogg and Peacock tell us of the unmusical character of the poet’s voice. In the opinion of the lady, whose singing was unutterably sweet to her spiritual worshiper, Shelley’s ‘voice was decidedly disagreeable.’ On seeing the familiar pictures of Shelley, that serve as the frontispieces in Hogg’s Life, and Trelawny’s Recollections, Peacock declined to regard them as likenesses of his former friend; putting them aside not merely as ineffective and unsatisfactory likenesses, but as no likenesses whatever of the individual they professed to represent. ‘The portraits,’ he remarked in Fraser, ‘do not impress themselves on me as likenesses; they seem to me to want the true outline of Shelley’s features, above all, to want their true expression.’ How could he honestly speak otherwise of the spurious and delusive portraits, ‘in which’ (to repeat his own words) ‘the nose has no turn-up?’ That Shelley had a small and distinctly tip-tilted nose, instead of the straight and rather large (though delicately moulded) nose of the lying pictures, appears from words penned by himself to Peacock, from Leghorn, in August, 1819. After speaking derisively of John Gisborne’s quite Slawkenbergian nose as a thing that, weighing upon the beholder’s imagination, and transforming all its owner’s g’s into k’s, was a feature scarcely to be forgiven by Christian charity, Shelley observed, ‘I, you know, have a little turn-up nose; Hogg has a large hook one; but add them together, square them, cube them, you would have but a faint notion of the nose to which I refer.’ Shelley having written in this way of the defective shape and size of a principal feature of his face, it is not surprising that, whilst avoiding such words as ‘unsymmetrical’ and ‘irregular,’ Lady Shelley admitted reluctantly in her Shelley Memorials, that the poet’s ‘features were not positively handsome.’ The wonder is that, after making this admission in the text, the lady told a different story in the frontispiece of her book. The evidence is superabundant that, instead of being positively handsome, Shelley’s little nose was positively tip-tilted, and his face positively unsymmetrical.

To see the real Shelley, as he appeared during life to persons who regarded him through no such disturbing medium as romantic glamour, it is needful to get the better of misconceptions, arising from the delusive portraitures of him, to be found in familiar biographies—the fanciful pictures, which are the more intolerable for being fruitful of misapprehensions respecting the poet’s moral endowments.

The epithet applied to the delusive portraitures, was chosen with deliberation. ‘Fanciful’ in effect, they had their origin in fancy, and may be fairly described as the offspring of fancy working upon fancy, at different times and under various conditions. Shelley never sate to a professional painter. From the year that produced the Indian-ink sketch of a young gentleman, wearing the scant gown and leading bands of an Oxford undergraduate, to the year of his death, Shelley never gave a competent painter an opportunity for producing a work, that would have prevented the fanciful misrepresentations from gaining any credit—possibly would even have prevented them from coming into existence.

It would have been better for his readers, and certainly no worse for his fame, had he never consented to sit to an amateur. But it was fated that the man, who suffered so much in more important matters from sterner adversaries, should suffer considerably from two dabblers in the fine arts. At Rome (Lady Shelley says in 1818, Trelawny says in 1819) Miss Curran began the portrait in oil, which she never finished, of the poet in his twenty-eighth year—the sketch which, dropped and relinquished by the fair limner, possibly because she felt she had made ‘a bad beginning,’ was destined to be the chief source of all the artistic falsities, that have been manufactured to his injury since his death. Trelawny says this failure was ‘left in an altogether flat and inanimate state’—a description to be kept in mind.

An amateur in oil (of the gentler sex) having thus attempted and failed to paint the poet when he was at Rome, two or three years later (1821 or 1822) Shelley surrendered himself to a masculine dabbler in water-colours—to Williams, the companion of his voyage to death. Possibly, this sketch (which differed from Miss Curran’s effort, in being finished) would have been preserved, had it accorded with the spurious portraitures, given so profusely in later time to a credulous and undiscerning public. But it has disappeared; and at the present date no one can say how far it merited the praise given to it by Trelawny, whose favourable opinion of the ‘spirited water-colour drawing’ would deserve more consideration, had he known half as much about the fine arts as he knew about horses and yachts. The Indian-ink sketch of a boy in the academicals of an Oxford undergraduate, the unfinished daub in oil, and the ‘spirited water-colour drawing,’ are the only portraits of the poet, known to have been produced by artists of any qualification or incapacity during his life.

Possibly, the Indian-ink sketch, which De Quincey saw somewhere in London, was the best of the three performances. It cannot have been much more absurd than Miss Curran’s absurdity, though from De Quincey’s words it seems to have been a sufficiently ludicrous production. ‘The sketch,’ says the Opium-Eater, ‘tallied pretty well with a verbal description which I had heard of him in some company, viz.: that he was tall, slender, and presenting the air of an elegant flower, whose head drooped from being surcharged with rain’—a description censured by the essayist for giving the equally false and disagreeable impression that the youthful littérateur ‘was tainted, even in his external deportment, by some excess of sickly sentimentalism, from which, however, in all stages of his life, he was remarkably free.’ Though, possibly, more like the man than Miss Curran’s fanciful oil-daub and Mr. Williams’s ‘spirited’ achievement in water-colour, this performance in Indian-ink, which made a young Englishman look like a dripping lily or a rose well wetted at a pump, was certainly a libel on the scandalous undergraduate.

Perhaps it would have been well had the spirited water-colour disappeared sooner. It would have been better than well had Miss Curran’s ‘failure’ been tossed into the Tiber as soon as she despaired of making a decent picture of it. Unfortunately, the thing that was only begun by a woman, and the thing that was finished to the last touch by man, survived the poet; so that Mrs. Shelley (through Mrs. Williams) was able to put them into the hands of Mr. Clint, with a request that out of such sorry materials, her own reminiscences—the recollections of a widow who liked to speak of herself as ‘the chosen mate of a celestial spirit’—and his sense of the fitness of things, he would compose a picture, worthy of being handed down to posterity, as the veritable and unquestionably historic likeness of the greatest lyrical poet of the nineteenth century.

The fancy picture, that was ‘composed’ under these less unusual than laughable circumstances, may not be more untruthful, but certainly is not more veracious, than the majority of fancy portraits. ‘Of these materials,’ Trelawny wrote in 1858, ‘Mrs. Williams, on her return to England after the death of Shelley, got Clint to compose a portrait, which the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life thought very like him. The water-colour drawing has been lost, so that the portrait done by Clint is the only one of any value.’ What evidential value can attach to a portrait ‘composed’ and ‘done’ under such circumstances? Apart from his weakness (one might, perhaps, say his dishonesty) in consenting to the prayer of the poet’s widow and her friend (Mrs. Williams), no blame belongs to Clint. Doing as portrait-painters are wont to do, when they agree to manufacture posthumous likenesses of people they have never seen, Clint worked up a fancy picture out of the two performances by amateurs; assuming that he might rely on those performances for correct information as to the principal features and general effect of the poet’s countenance. On points where the two performances gave incongruent evidence, he relied on the widows (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) to instruct him as to which of the two performances was the more trustworthy. The portrait having been ‘composed’ and ‘done’ in this way, the final touches were added in accordance with further information from Mrs. Williams and further suggestions by ‘the chosen mate of a celestial spirit.’

The falseness and absurdity of the composition are mainly referable to the romantic view Miss Curran took of the poet’s appearance, and to her romantic desire to give him the beauty which she deemed appropriate to the author of incomparably beautiful poems. Rating him with the angels, the lady was determined he should look like an angel—on her canvas. Beginning with this ambition, it is no matter for surprise that she made only ‘a beginning.’ If he was instructed to rely on the daub in oil, rather than on the spirited water-colour, it is not wonderful Clint went wrong. In her resolve to make Shelley look like an angel, Miss Curran decided to make the principal feature of his portrait altogether unlike the most prominent feature of his face. In the face, this feature wanted the size and contour needful for the romantic beauty, with which the lady would fain have endowed her bard. In the picture, this particular feature has every quality required in a feature of its kind by connoisseurs of romantic beauty—connoisseurs, that is to say, of the conventional school to which the lady and her friends (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) belonged.

The artist was not more interested than either of the other ladies in misrepresenting the poet in this particular feature. Mrs. Williams was animated with sentimental tenderness for the poet, who wrote her so much beautiful poetry. It was natural for this romantic mourner to wish that in his historic portrait, her Platonic lover should be relieved of a facial defect, that in her opinion amounted to disfigurement. Whilst mourning sincerely for her husband, Mrs. Williams mourned romantically for the poet who had perished with her husband in the same wild storm. In like manner, Mrs. Shelley (whose notions of the beautiful were purely conventional) was desirous that this particular feature should be dealt with tenderly, delicately, lovingly, in the portrait that would represent her husband’s facial show to future ages. Hence it was, that whilst he was composing the great historic portrait chiefly out of Miss Curran’s artistic falsehood, neither of the ladies, on whose guidance he relied, was in a mood to tell Mr. Clint in what respect the oil-daub was especially misleading, or even to hint it was likely to mislead him in any way. Sixty years since, a little turn-up nose was universally regarded as a nose wholly unbefitting a poet. In their measures for rendering their poet altogether admirable and lovely to unborn ages, both ladies were especially desirous that on the historic canvas he should be endowed with a nose wholly unlike the one that had been, in their eyes, the great blemish of his earthly tabernacle.

If Trelawny’s evidence may be accepted, Clint did his work to the satisfaction of ‘the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life.’ As Trelawny was one of those few, the ‘composition’ may be assumed to have had his approval. But Trelawny knew nothing of pictures, and little of the poet with whose story he will be associated to the end of time. The whole term of their friendly intercourse exceeded six months by no more than two or three days. And throughout that term the Cornish gentleman, with his simple reverence for literature and men of letters, regarded the poet through the glamour that makes things seem other than they are. On being shown the portrait for the first time, with an assurance that people approved it, Trelawny was not the man to discover anything wrong in it. When he saw it for the first time, a considerable number of long years had elapsed since the death of his acquaintance for six short months. Under these circumstances, Trelawny’s good word goes for nothing in the estimate of the spurious performance. That Hogg resembled Peacock in rating the picture at its proper worthlessness is matter of certainty; for though an engraving of the artistic imposture faces the title-page of his first volume, the biographer shows himself fully alive to the fictitious nature of the composition, by his vivid and minute verbal portraitures of the poet at Oxford and in later stages of his career.

Since Trelawny published Vinter’s lithograph of the picture as a frontispiece to the Recollections (1858), numerous engravings have appeared on wood, stone, or metal, of the posthumous ‘composition’ which the Cornish gentleman, at the time of his book’s appearance, regarded as the only reliable painting of the poet. ‘The water-colour drawing has been lost,’ Trelawny wrote in 1858, ‘so the portrait done by Clint is the only one of any value.’ At that time he was far from imagining that the oil-sketch, which Miss Curran ‘never finished, and left in an altogether flat and inanimate state,’ would ever compete in public confidence with the posthumous ‘composition.’ To the present writer it has not seemed worth the while to inquire what (if anything) was done to Miss Curran’s ‘failure,’ to bring it out of the ‘altogether flat and inanimate state,’ and put it into a condition to be regarded (on the authority of words spoken by Sir Percy Shelley, on the authority of his mother) as the ‘best portrait extant’ of the poet. It is enough for the present writer and his readers to know that Miss Curran’s beginning of a portrait has risen to this place in Sir Percy’s esteem—to know that it rose eventually to an equally high place in Mary Godwin Shelley’s esteem—to know from Lady Shelley’s assurance that the frontispiece of the third edition of her Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources, is an engraving from (to use her ladyship’s words) ‘the original picture by Miss Curran, painted at Rome in 1818, now in Sir Percy Shelley’s possession’—to know, from Mr. Buxton Forman’s authoritative assurance, that the frontispiece to the first volume of his edition of The Poetical Works is an engraving from the same ‘best portrait extant,’ and not an engraving of Clint’s posthumous ‘composition’—to know that engravings from this ‘best portrait extant’ have, like the engravings at first hand of the ‘composition,’ been repeatedly re-engraved (with or without variations to suit the requirements of editorial taste),—and, lastly, to know that all the engravings and re-engravings of the two delusive originals are flagrant and altogether-to-be-repudiated misrepresentations of the poet’s actual appearance.

After what has been said of Miss Curran’s unfinished oil-sketch, and Clint’s posthumous ‘composition,’ which was mainly made up from the lady’s derelict absurdity, it is needless to say that all the engravings and re-engravings of the abandoned fib and the elaborate falsehood bear a close resemblance to one another. Resembling one another in the contour of the features, the arrangement of the hair (even to the tips of the curls), the items of costume (even to the shape of the rumpled Byronic collars), these engravings and re-engravings might be mistaken for reproductions of the same original picture—allowance being made for the taste and whims of engravers, the fancies and requirements of editors. The only difference between the avowed engravings from Miss Curran’s daub and the engravings of Mr. Clint’s composition is that the former are something more unnatural and unsatisfactory than the latter. The poet of the former lot of engravings is a somnambulant girl—a sleepwalker from dyspepsia, who, on leaving her bed somehow or other, contrived to put on her brother’s walking-coat instead of her own bodice. The poet of the latter set of engravings is a very pretty girl, exhibiting no sign of disease, apart from the indications of a desire to look something wiser and prettier than she really is. Like the somnambulant girl of the more disagreeable picture, the young lady of these less disagreeable engravings has put on her brother’s coat, wears Byronic shirt-collars, has a quill pen in her lily-white hand, and is so posed that her right fore-arm is resting on an open manuscript. Of the dozen or more engravings of this young lady now lying open before the present writer’s desk, the one to which he would direct his readers’ attention—in consideration of its being the most agreeable, typical, and artistic of them all—is the engraving by that fine engraver, Francis Holl, which does duty as frontispiece to the first volume of Hogg’s (unfinished) Life.

What is offered to the eye by this frontispiece? It is the picture of a man, to judge of it from the coat, the folds of the Byronic shirt-collar, and the absence of the developments of the breast that are such powerful elements of feminine loveliness. It is the picture of a beautiful girl, to judge of it by the girlish face and hair, the girlishness of the long, slender neck. The first thing to strike the beholder of this girl’s face is the symmetrical character of its delicate beauty. The symmetry is perfect—too perfect, even for a girl of seventeen. The fine pencillings of the eye-brows, the curves immediately beneath the eyes, the superior contours of the cheeks, the line and shadow-line of the long, straight nose, the outlines of the lower parts of the countenance, the curlings of the small kissable lips and dainty chin, are all finely, unsurpassably symmetrical. If the word may be applied to things so lovely and delicate, symmetry is carried even to caricature in the details of this girlish face. Of course the face, so delicately girlish, is deficient in the strength, the indications of force, active or latent, always to be looked for and, in some degree, invariably discernible in the countenance of a man of mark.

Though he never sate to professional painter, Shelley sate to a sculptor of sufficient ability, whose chisel produced a work of art that, indicating with sufficient clearness the two chief defects of the poet’s least comely feature, fortunately, still exists, to give the lie to the foolish pictures, and to protest with mute eloquence against the policy of misrepresentation, which pursues its ends with insolent disregard for the rights of the many thousands of persons, who are interested in knowing the truth and the whole truth, and in believing nothing but the truth, about one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the present century.

But though it offered violence to romantic and conventional notions of poetical beauty, and gave his countenance a contour very different from the profile of the delusive portraits, it may not be imagined that the ‘little turn-up nose’ caused Shelley to be otherwise than a man of a singularly striking and charming appearance. Tall for his years, from his childhood till he attained the fullness of his stature, Shelley had a slender figure that would not have wanted elegance, had it not been for the slight drooping and roundness of his shoulders, the narrowness of his chest, and the forward inclination of his long neck and minute head—peculiarities scarcely reconcilable with all that has been written about his personal stateliness. To imagine that the young man who paced the streets of Oxford and London ‘with bent knees and outstretched neck’ (in the manner described by Hogg), was remarkable for the grace and dignity of his carriage, is to surrender one’s judgment to the sway of romantic biographers. None the less certain, however, is it that there were moments when Shelley’s countenance might be commended for loveliness. Remarkable for a complexion, in which carmine-red and delicate white, instead of being blended, were separately conspicuous, even when it was most freckled by exposure to the sun, the face surmounting his long and slender frame was singularly expressive of intelligence, sympathy, nervous alertness, enthusiasm, and sincerity. Dull in moments of contemplation, the prominent deep-blue eyes of Trelawny’s stag-eyed Shelley were comparable with Byron’s grey-blue eyes, for overpowering vehemence under the impulses of strong and sudden emotion. Though inferior to Byron’s feminine mouth in beauty, and even more deficient than Byron’s mouth in power, Shelley’s mouth—the one symmetrical part of his unsymmetrical countenance—was notable for shapeliness, and alike expressive of sensibility and refinement.

In other particulars, Shelley’s head and face were comparable with Byron’s head and face. Like Byron, the author of Laon and Cythna had a head of striking smallness. It is a matter to be pondered by the physiologists, who maintain no man can be mentally powerful unless he has a big bulk of brain and a big pan to hold it, that the two greatest poets of the nineteenth century were, perhaps, the two smallest-headed Englishmen of their time. Though it wanted the auburn under-glow, the feathery softness, and careful keeping of the Byronic tresses, Shelley’s brown shock—blonde brown in childhood, deep brown ere it began prematurely to turn grey—resembled the locks of his familiar friend and fellow-poet in curling naturally. The most prominent feature of either poet’s face was the one in which he differed most conspicuously from the other. In that feature Byron had greatly the advantage. Had he not grudged the poet whom he hated this personal advantage over the poet whom he loved, Leigh Hunt would not have been at so much pains to describe the faults of Byron’s nose—its excessive massiveness, and its appearance of having been put upon the face, rather than of growing out of it. But whilst inferior to Byron’s face in that important feature, Shelley’s face, in its naturalness and seraphic gentleness, its candour and high simplicity, was possessed of charms no one would venture to attribute to Byron’s more earthly loveliness. In spite of its grand defect, Shelley’s was a face that reminded his two closest friends of works of Italian art. Whilst Peacock speaks of his vanished friend’s resemblance to the portrait of Antonio Leisman in the Florentine Gallery, Hogg likens the sweetest and loftiest element of the poet’s facial beauty to the air of profound religious veneration that may be observed in the best frescoes of the greatest masters of Florence and Rome.

There is no need to inquire how the lovely face of Mr. Colnaghi’s engraving came to be regarded as a portrait of Shelley in his childhood. Still less is there any need to inquire whether the original picture was the work of the exiled French prince to whom it has been attributed. The present writer has no wish to deal disrespectfully with any part of the picture’s story that does not touch the poet’s record. For this work’s purpose it is enough to say authoritatively that the child, whose delicate and exquisitely symmetrical lineaments are exhibited in the Colnaghi engraving, cannot have been the infantile Shelley, because it is not in the nature of things that the poet of unsymmetrical visage and ‘little turn-up nose’ was the development of the child, whose facial loveliness was so perfect an example of facial symmetry, and whose nose could not by any possibility have changed into the tip-tilted feature, described so precisely by the poet himself. Portraits are often strangely mis-assigned; but it is seldom for a portrait to be so egregiously mis-assigned as this so-called picture of the child Shelley. Had not Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams succeeded in palming off on romantic credulity their symmetrical and straight-nosed ‘composition’ as a veritable picture of ‘The Real Shelley,’ it would never have occurred to any one to suggest that the original of the Colnaghi engraving was the poet Shelley at a tender age.