unlucky. We have no such remark to make upon the little book in which they themselves have paid their proud and tender tribute to the memory which Mr. Hogg, as they say, has injured so grievously. Lady Shelley writes remarkably well; and the good feeling and generous ardour which she shows throughout, though they sometimes carry her too far, are worthy of her, and of her subject. But her book is not, and does not profess to be, a life. Still less can Mr. Peacock's valuable articles be supposed to make such a pretension. But if we have no good life of Shelley, we are already in possession of a Shelley Literature, quite extensive enough for a modest English poet. The reminiscences of friends and the estimates of admirers are becoming alarmingly numerous; and from such materials, read along with poems that are full of conscious and unconscious self-delineation, it is quite possible to. form a tolerably clear notion of the outward events of Shelley's. life, and of the man whom those events befel.

Shelley was born on the 4th of August, 1792, the eldest son of Timothy Shelley, Esq., afterwards Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart. His father, an opulent country gentleman, was not an unkind, but a narrowminded, injudicious, and, if we may trust Mr. Hogg, singularly ridiculous person, and the affection which his son oncefelt for him was at an early period hopelessly alienated. Shelley declared at nineteen that he had known no tutor or adviser (not excepting his father) 'from whose lessons he had not recoiled with disgust;' and yet he had received the education usual in his rank; but he was one to whom the ordinary trainingmasculine, but rough and unsympathetic-was not suited. He was sent very early to a school at Brentford, and afterwards to Eton; but his nerves were too sensitive and his imagination already too susceptible to make a great school anything but a place of misery to him. There was only one part of the business of either in which he seems to have been very successful. He wrote Latin verses, we are told, with marvellous facility. Lady Shelley, however, who preserves this circumstance, and who talks with some contempt of the trammels of the Gradus, tells us also that those youthful compositions were not in accordance with rule, and were generally torn up. Latin verses that are not in accordance with rule are bad Latin verses. But if Lady Shelley means, as we conjecture, to reproach the Eton authorities with having disregarded the poetic promise of their pupil, and concentrated their attention on false concords and false quantities, we must take the liberty to say that her censure is preposterous. The object of teaching boys to write Latin verses is not to make them poets, but to make them scholars; and Dr. Keate and his subordinates were bound, before all things, to insist on those excellences

excellences which a Shelley could only attain by submitting to the same irksome drudgery as the most prosaic young cricketer in the school.

Unhappily it is not only in verse writing that a public schoo offers, and can by possibility offer, no immunities to genius. Robinson Crusoe was never in so dreary a solitude as this sensitive, delicate young poet, while all the noise and frolic and life of a great school 'beat on his satiate ear.' At Brentford he would bask against the south wall, or stroll through the playground listless and dreamy, his excitable imagination wandering and wasting itself among the magicians, and fairies, and talismans, and spirits, of some kingdom in the air. At Eton he was rudely awakened from these incommunicable dreams. Several hundred boys were gathered together, vigorous in mind and body, and overflowing with animal spirits. Their superfluous activity and mischief delighted in tormenting the delicate lad who shrank from their horseplay, and burned with indignation when he saw their selfishness and cruelty. Even had he himself not suffered from them, he had no healthy boyish obtuseness to conceal from him those unamiable characteristics of youth. Coarser natures and stronger natures find a great deal both of profit and enjoyment in the struggles of our noble old schools. Mr. Thackeray even tells us how some of Dr. Keate's pupils can laugh, and rejoice, and become young again, while they recall the castigations of boyhood, and 'mimic to the best of their power the manner and mode of operating of the famous doctor. This one regarded the doctor's victims as if they had been Marshal Haynau's. He would not have thought it less heartless to make a jolly story of the one flagellation than of the other. And he saw no more good humour in a schoolfellow's clenched fist than in a master's birch-rod. He recoiled from the one and the other with a child's natural anger at what seems to be injustice; and with a 'schoolboy heat' and blind hysterical passion of personal independence, which Dr. Arnold would have regarded with no more favour than Dr. Keate. These feelings in him were far too keen and intense to allow of his seeing anything but the selfishness and strength of his schoolfellows. They were tyrants, and their tyranny was legalized and imitated by masters who allowed fagging, and who flogged; but he, at least, would submit to no such degradation: he would not be a fag. This resolve was little likely to diminish the persecution for which, in any case, his shy disposition and tenderness of nerve must have afforded in schoolboy eyes only too tempting an opportunity. We enter into no ingenious speculation as to what Shelley might have been had his course of

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training been different; but it is certain that his hatred of all laws and ordinances must have been greatly aggravated by his experiences of Eton. If nature had bestowed upon him the capacity of feeling respect for authority at all, it was only at the feet of some wise Gamaliel that such a faculty could have been developed. The sole personage of that description with whom he came in contact has been depicted, for the benefit of posterity, in the Hermit that liberated Laon, and the wise Zonoras who taught Prince Athanase. But neither Zonoras nor the Hermit, among the lessons of 'philosophic wisdom calm and mild' with which they filled the souls of their pupils, ever thought of touching upon such themes as law or obedience, duty or self-control; nor did they hint at so delicate a distinction as that between government and oppression. The teaching of their prototype Dr. Lind did not differ in this respect from theirs. He was a physician and tutor, who treated the forlorn boy with a great deal of kindness, invited him to his house, tended him through a dangerous fever, and saved him also, as Shelley believed— though both the danger and the rescue were probably altogether imaginary—from being consigned in the opening of life to a lunatic asylum. But, amiable as he seems to have been, Mr. Hogg tells a strange story which shows that he was, to say the least, a very injudicious guide, philosopher, and friend for such a youth as Shelley. Dr. Lind, it appears, had been injured, or fancied he had been injured, by George III. Shelley stood in a similar position towards his own father; and therefore, to relieve their o'erburdened hearts, this pair of friends used to unite, after tea, in a solemn and vehement anathema, in which the father of one and the Sovereign of both were heartily devoted to the infernal gods. It was years afterwards at Oxford that Mr. Hogg had an opportunity of hearing the half-playful comminations of this unfilial young Ernulphus, who told him that it was from his friend Dr. Lind, at Eton, that he had learned to curse his father and the King.

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He found at Oxford a milder discipline and a far more congenial atmosphere than that of Eton. From lectures he learned little, and had, or fancied that he had, little opportunity of learning. A college tutor, we are told, recommended him to read the Prometheus Vinctus,' and Demosthenes de Corona,' and Euclid,' and Aristotle's 'Ethics,' and left him to follow the advice or to neglect it, as he might think fit. Shelley regretted the absence of guidance far less than he was charmed with the absence of restraint. He could not be happy unless he could be free; and at Oxford he was perfectly free to devote himself to whatever researches of learning or discoveries in

science

science might happen to attract his subtle and refined understanding. He shared not at all in the social enjoyments of the place, which would have contributed more than any lectures to counteract the morbid tendencies of his character; but he found in Mr. Hogg a friend possessing kindred tastes to his own, and an aptitude for the higher branches of intellectual cultivation, with whom to enjoy that fearless, unrestrained discussion in which he took delight. This gentleman gives us—it is far the best part of his book—an interesting account of the days and nights they spent 'In search of deep philosophy,

Wit, eloquence, and poetry;'

and of the personal habits, appearance, and demeanour of his college friend. There is something very attractive in his description of the poet. Nowhere else is his writing so vivid as when he tells us of the tall, delicate, fragile figure, the wild eyes, the expressive, beautiful, feminine features, the little head covered with long brown hair, the gracefulness and simplicity of manner, and the screaming and dissonant voice by which those personal advantages were unluckily accompanied, and which, for sensitive ears at least, was apt to overbalance them all. Other writers assure us, however, that this harshness of voice was observable only in the excitement of discussion, and that at other times its notes were not only distinct and clear, but low and sweet, and 'tunable' as those of Hermia herself. If this be so, its most jarring tones must have been those that were most familiar to Mr. Hogg; for with Shelley at Oxford, study seems to have been almost synonymous with ceaseless disputation.

Chemistry at this time was his favourite pursuit. His rooms were littered with retorts and crucibles, galvanic troughs and electrical machines. And while he burned his furniture with slovenly experiments and nearly poisoned his friend with aqua regia, as he used to declare that he had poisoned himself at Eton with arsenic, he would declaim with glowing eloquence on the dignity and glory of the physical sciences. He disliked mathematics, as it was natural that he should. We do not say that the 'thirst for knowledge' which Shelley's biographers claim for him -as, indeed, he claims it for himself-was nothing but love of discussion; but at least it was intensified in the fervour of controversy, and it was not to be satisfied by mathematics. The mysteries of this unfathomable world' were found to be much more nutritious. It was like some inspired and desperate alchemist that he pursued his investigations of nature; and when physical science failed him-as it always will fail those who cultivate

it

it in his impulsive, fragmentary fashion—he turned with unlucky eagerness to metaphysics.

He had already some acquaintance with Plato: he had read the Banquet' with the assistance of Dacier, and mused over the eloquence of Agathon, and the mystic wisdom of Diotima. But the writers who at this time had the strongest hold of his mind were of a different description. Mr. Hogg says that Locke was the favourite; but we doubt whether he had really studied the greatEssay on the Human Understanding.' He certainly imbibed little of the patient wisdom and manly good sense of its author; and when he proclaims with characteristic emphasis that 'that philosopher has clearly traced all our knowledge to sensation,' we recognise the teaching of Condillac and the Encyclopedists, not that of Locke. Unluckily a more fascinating sophist fell in his way. Hume's 'Essays' attracted him, and he seized upon their doctrines in a manner that would have rather surprised David Hume. No one was less likely than its calm, cool, clearheaded author to adopt as a substantive practical tenet the result of that ingenious process of argumentation, by which Hume proposes to throw human knowledge into confusion and overturn philosophy. For Shelley's eager intellect, to catch a glimpse of such a system was to embrace it. The elaborate reductio ad absurdum which led Hume to scepticism, Shelley adopted as an ultimate conviction. The truths which Hume said could not be proved, Shelley held to be disproved; and having established to his own satisfaction the impossibility of the existence of a God, he was far too impulsively benevolent to hesitate about converting all mankind to the same delightful conviction. The catastrophe is well known. He had printed a short abstract of some of Hume's doctrines, entitling it 'The Necessity of Atheism.' This at all events was the thesis it was designed to support, and having established the matter satisfactorily, he wound up with a Q. E. D. The pamphlet was not published, and it bore no author's name; but copies were sent to persons who were thought likely to engage in controversy on such a subject. The mode of operation,' says Mr. Hogg, 'was this. He enclosed a copy in a letter and sent it by the post, stating, with modesty and simplicity, that he had met accidentally with that little tract, which appeared unhappily to be quite unanswerable. Unless the fish was too sluggish to take the bait, an answer of refutation was forwarded to an appointed address in London, and then in a vigorous reply he would fall upon the unwary disputant and break his bones.' Unhappily the University of Oxford was dragged into the controversy. Mr. De Quincey says that Shelley himself sent copies of his pamphlet

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