PREFATORY MEMOIR. ERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY was born at Field Place, Timothy Shelley, of Castle-Goring. Till he was seven or eight years of age he was brought up with his sisters. Sharing their education, and having no boy companion, he never gained a taste for the ordinary sports and amusements of boyhood; and on this account became subject to a good deal of rough usage at school, which may have tended to wake up the spirit of opposition for which he was afterwards remarkable. His first school was that of Sion House, Brentford; from whence, at thirteen, he passed to Eton; from Eton to Oxford in 1810. Before he entered the University Shelley published two rather silly novels. At Oxford the peculiarities of this wild genius became remarkable. He lived, we are told, chiefly on bread; he carried duelling pistols in his pocket when walking, and would occasionally pause to shoot at some mark he had fixed for himself; he would linger for hours throwing stones into ponds, or sailing paper boats. These harmless and childish eccentricities were, however, destined to be followed by much more objectionable developments. The "times were out of joint." The French Revolution had unsettled steadier minds than Shelley's; he embraced the wildest dogmas of the day, and actually published a pamphlet entitled the "Necessity of Atheism." For this performance he was (with his friend, Mr. Hogg) expelled from the university. During his last term at college be had also published a strange half-mad volume of poems, called the "Posthumous Works of Margaret Nicholson," which has happily fallen out of remembrance. At the time of his expulsion he was only seventeen, but he was already deeply attached to a cousin who had been born on the same day with himself. His expulsion from Oxford and its cause disappointed this affection, and his beloved cousin became the wife of another. Shelley had naturally given great offence to his family, but his father offered to forgive him if he would return home, give up his friend Hogg, and study with a private tutor. These terms appear all that any lad of Shelley's age could hope for; nevertheless he refused them, and remained in London; but, as he himself informed Hogg, his father allowed him 2007. a year. The sorrow and sympathy of his sisters were naturally awakened by this event, and they sent him loving gifts by the hand of a schoolfellow, Harriet Westbrook, a beautiful girl of sixteen, of inferior station to themselves, her father being the landlord of a tavern. Shelley undertook to teach Miss Westbrook his principles, and found her an apt pupil. The young girl, finally resenting what Shelley calls the "brutal tyranny of her father, who has persecuted her in the most horrible way by endeavouring to compel her to go to school," came to Shelley, and threw herself on his protection. The youth acted honourably; his instincts as a gentleman prevailed against the hateful doctrines he thought he had embraced; he married Miss Westbrook. Not long after he printed the “Hermit of Marlow,” on occasion of the death of the Princess Charlotte. It was a mere political skit. Under the lament for the Princess he typified the death of Liberty. Not very long after he printed for private circulation a poem, begun at seventeen, "Queen Mab." We think it is a pity that this poem should still hold a place in his collected works; his second wife, Mary Shelley, believed that his mature taste would have rejected it. Nor in fact did he ever publish it; it was brought to light by a literary piracy. All that he thought worth retaining in it he reprinted in "The Demon of the World." Shelley's first marriage proved unhappy. In 1814 he abandoned his wife, child, and an infant born after this desertion; and started for Italy with Mary Godwin, the daughter of the well-known author of "Caleb Williams" and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose opinions resembled those embraced by Shelley. It appears that, though he had abandoned Harriet, he still felt a friendly regard for her, and even wished her, we are informed, to live in the house with him and Miss Godwin as a friend! A legal adviser showed him that this was impossible. Two years afterwards the unhappy Harriet drowned herself, leaving her two orphan babes in the care of her father, with whom she had taken refuge, and who had settled 2000/. upon the poor children. Shelley would have retaken his children after Harriet's death, but Mr. Westbrook refused to yield them up. A Chancery suit ensued, and the babes were placed under other guardianship than their father's. In fact, he had never seen the boy (born after his desertion of the mother), and had never manifested any parental affection for either till he made this claim. He had an illegitimate son by Mary Godwin; he had written a poem wholly against Christianity;—therefore we think the law rightly adjudged the guardianship of poor Harriet's children to wiser hands than Shelley's. Before his wife's death Shelley wrote and published "Alastor," his first mature poem. After her death he married Miss Godwin, and went with her to Italy. however a friendly rivalry with Keats led to his writing "The Revolt of Islam"-the rival poem being the "Endymion." Previously Shelley never again revisited England. At Rome he wrote his finest poem, the "Prometheus Unbound." The awful tragedy of the "Cenci" followed, and in various parts of Italy his other poems of that date. His friend, Captain Medwin, tells us that "Julian and Maddalo❞ were meant to delineate himself and Lord Byron, with whom he was for some time on terms of great intimacy. The life of this very original and gifted poet terminated at the early age of thirty. He was fond of boating, and a friend who had located near him at Venice-Captain Williams-and himself returning from Leghorn to their home near Lerici in a new boat he had built, were overtaken by a sudden storm. The boat went down instantly. Captain Williams attempted to save himself by swimming. His body, half undressed, was cast upon the beach; but Shelley was |