CHAPTER IV

.

THE BRENTFORD SCHOOLBOY.

Dr. Greenlaw's Character--Quality of his School--Medwin's Anecdotes to the Doctor's Discredit--Mr. Gellibrand's Recollections of the Brentford Shelley--The Bullies of the Brentford Playground--Shelley's Character at the School--His Disposition to Somnambulism--His Delight in Novels--His Wretchedness at School--Shelleyan Egotism--Byronic Egotism--Byron's Influence on Shelley--Enduring Influence of Novels on Shelley's Mind--Stories of Boating--Easter Holidays in Wiltshire--'Essay on Friendship'--Its Biographical Value.

The slight slip of a boy, who under the name of Percy Bysshe Shelley, appeared for the first time in his eleventh year (the third year of the present century) amongst the boys of Dr. Greenlaw's school at Sion House, Brentford, was no child to prefer the society of overbearing boys to the society of his little sisters, whose playmate he had hitherto been.

Dr. Greenlaw's home for young gentlemen was a house of forbidding aspect. More than once as they walked from London to Bishopgate (familiar to those who are in the habit of entering Windsor Park from Englefield Green), Shelley directed Hogg's attention to the gloomy walls of his first boarding-school. The house was unalluring, the master not incapable of outbreaks of anger, the boys by no means innocent of puerile rudeness and inhumanity. But the present writer, who in former time knew some of Dr. Greenlaw's scholarly descendants, has reason to believe the doctor was a kindlier gentleman, and his school a much less defective establishment, than Mr. Medwin made the world imagine.

Taking much credit to himself for having been at Brentford a sympathetic and condescending senior schoolmate to his little far-away cousin, Tom Medwin speaks with ungenerous resentment of the seminary where they sipt the Pierian spring. All that his bitter words amount to is that Dr. Greenlaw was a pedagogue, and Sion House a seminary, 'of an old school.' If the bread served to the boys at breakfast and supper was parsimoniously dressed with butter, the fare was neither better nor worse than the bread and butter usually provided for schoolboys eighty years since. If the Saturday's pie was a scrap-pie, and a poor specimen of its inferior kind of pie, it was only such a thing as schoolboys of the period were expected to eat with thankfulness. A schoolboy's toilet, in the days of our grandfathers, was always a short and simple business. As the boys seldom saw the lady, who never harassed or troubled them in any way, Mr. Medwin might as well have forborne to sneer at Mrs. Greenlaw for priding herself less on her husband's calling, than on being distantly related to the Duke of Argyll. Mr. Medwin was not a little proud of his slight relationship to the Castle Goring Shelleys, though they were not (to put the case mildly) the best of the Sussex families. He might, therefore, have spoken leniently of Mrs. Greenlaw's sense of the dignity of her people, or been silent about the matter. Himself the son of a country attorney, Mr. Medwin should have written a little less disdainfully of his old schoolfellows, for being 'mostly the sons of London shopkeepers.' Nor is the Rev. Dr. Greenlaw (he was in holy orders and had a Scotch degree) to be severely judged if, when pupils were few, he was something less inquisitive than he might have been about the quality of parents. To live, schoolmasters must fill up their beds; and to be placed at school in the same dormitory with a cheesemonger's son is an indignity, to be forgiven (after forty years) even by the son of a solicitor of the High Court of Judicature.

It may, however, be conceded that Sion House was no more a fit school for the heir of a great county family, than the Clapham school, where the poet's sisters received their higher education, was a suitable seminary for the daughters of an aristocratic house. Whilst little Bysshe was still making Latin verses in the company of tradesmen's sons, the elder of his sisters went to the Clapham school, where Harriett Westbrook (the daughter of a licensed victualler) in later time learnt something of French and the answers to Mangnall's Questions. It may not, however, be inferred that Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, of Field Place, were deficient in proper care for their own dignity, or in proper concern for the welfare of their offspring. Though no place of education for the sons of the English aristocracy, Sion House was greatly superior to the 'commercial schools' where tradesmen sent their boys to be trained for the counter and the counting-house. It was a 'classical school' for the sons of ordinary professional men (boys like Tom Medwin), and the sons of well-to-do and ambitious tradesmen, bent on putting their boys into the liberal professions. The Clapham school for girls was a school of corresponding quality,--a place of education for the daughters of people moving in the middle way of life. That he sent his children to such schools merely shows that the Squire of Field Place was not possessed by the spirit of exclusiveness, that is a characteristic of aristocratic personages; that he was still far from rating himself with the aristocracy of his county, though he had taken a degree at Oxford, made the grand tour, and risen to represent New Shoreham in the House of Commons. That the children were sent to such schools shows how far the head of the family (old Mr. Bysshe Shelley, the son of the Newark apothecary and the friend of Graham, the quack) was from over-estimating his social position; how far he was from deeming himself one of the dignitaries of his shire, though he had married the heiress of Penshurst, and adding acre to acre, was rich enough to spend tens of thousands on the big castle, which he never finished or inhabited.

Instead of enjoying the status, which delusive biographers declare them to have enjoyed for successive centuries, the poet's people were in his childhood only emerging from the middle class of society. Planted though they had been for some time within the outer breastworks of provincial gentility, they were still regarded by their patrician neighbours as people of ambiguous quality,--too wealthy to be rated with mere 'gentle populace,' and at the same time, too wanting in local influence and ancestral dignity to be rated with the _élite_ of 'the county.' Fortunate though it had been, old Mr. Bysshe Shelley's career was more calculated to provoke scandal than conciliate social sentiment. Though it had done much for his enrichment, his second marriage had also caused leading families of Sussex and Kent to regard him with animosity, and speak of him with disapproval. Strange stories were told of the ways in which the old man had made money,--was still making money. The sordid tastes and habits, that rendered him equally despicable and pitiable in his senility, were already revealing themselves, and confirming people of honest pride and good principle in their resolve to hold aloof from him. To personages of the county, who had long looked down upon them as obtrusive upstarts, the father and son grew more distasteful in proportion as they grew richer. Instead of being diminished, this disfavour was for a time quickened by the civilities, which for political reasons the Duke of Norfolk thought fit to offer to the Horsham capitalist and the Member for New Shoreham. Both within and without the lines of the Liberal party, dislike of these 'new men' was stimulated by the growing opinion that, if the younger kept his seat for the Sussex borough, and voted steadily in accordance with the Duke's pleasure, the elder of them would in a few years be raised to the dignity for which he had long hungered.

Thus regarded in Sussex, it is not surprising that the poet's father and grandfather lived more within the lines of their proper middle-class connexion, than with the higher gentry of their neighbourhood, and that, in selecting schools for his children, Mr. Timothy Shelley acted in harmony with the views of his middle-class friends and relations. It is not surprising that little Bysshe was sent to the school that was good enough for the boys of people like the Medwins, and none too good for the tradesmen's sons who came between the wind and Tom Medwin's nobility. Nor is it surprising that in later time little Bysshe's sisters were sent to the suburban academy, where the youngest of them became intimate with Harriett Westbrook,--the lovely child of 'Jew Westbrook,' the licensed victualler. Had he in 1802 felt more certain of getting the baronetcy for which he was playing (and won only four years later--1806), it is probable that the Horsham money-maker would have loosened his purse-string, and told his son (the M.P.) that Sion House was not good enough school for the heir of the Castle Goring Shelleys. Had the father and son foreseen what embarrassment and scandal would come to the Castle Goring Shelleys from friendships made at the Clapham girls'-school, it is probable that the poet's sisters would have been sent to a more select seminary, or have been educated, even to the finishing touches of their education, at Field Place.

That the Reverend Dr. Greenlaw was a fairly sufficient pedagogue may be inferred even from the reluctant admissions of the writer, who is our chief source of information respecting little Bysshe's life at Sion House. Whilst telling apocryphal stories to the discredit of his scholarship, Medwin concedes that the Doctor was 'a tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,' drilled his pupils assiduously in Homer, and carried them 'in his own way' through some of the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Mr. Medwin was not so precisely accurate a writer that we must accept all his statements to the schoolmaster's disadvantage. Possibly, in recalling the teacher's way of 'driving straightforwards in defiance of obstacles,' the biographer only remembered his own way of dealing with choruses and other perplexing passages of the Greek dramatists. The historian who misquoted the Ovidian verses, in his worst and most damaging story against the Doctor, may also have misquoted the sorry verses inscribed on the Scotch mull which Charles Mackintosh (a former pupil at Sion House) gave his preceptor. If the verses of the mull were as bad as the biographer represents, and were (as the same authority alleges) the production of the Doctor's own head and hand, their extreme badness disproves the assertion that the Doctor 'was a tolerable Greek and Latin Scholar.' However much misquoted in Medwin's _Life of Shelley_, the verses must have been bad; but it is more probable that 'Carolus Mackintosh ... _alumnus_' composed the lame lines inscribed upon his gift, than that they were put together by 'the tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,' who had grown grey in teaching boys to make Latin verses. Recollections after a lapse of forty years, touching the infirmities of former schoolmasters, should be regarded with suspicion, even when they proceed from habitually careful narrators. But when a gentleman of almost proverbial inaccuracy entertains the world with irreconcilable reminiscences of the same individual, he may be regarded as labouring for a moment under the besetting infirmity, that always weakens Mr. Medwin's testimony, and sometimes deprives it of all value.

That the successful schoolmaster (bound alike by his interest and the obligations of his office to be mindful of the proprieties) disgusted little Bysshe, and delighted the rest of the class with obscene jocosity in reference to a familiar passage of the _Æneid_, is less probable than that Tom Medwin's memory betrayed him. It is easier to believe that in a mood of unusual irritability and dullness Dr. Greenlaw discovered execrable Latinity in the Ovidian lines:

'Me miserum! quanti montes volvuntur aquarum! Jam, jam tacturas sidera summa putes,'--

which little Bysshe 'gave in' as verses of his own manufacture. '_Jam, jam!_' the Doctor is said to have exclaimed during the course of animadversions that were emphasized with slaps administered to the child's small cheeks and ears. '_Jam, jam!_ Pooh, pooh, boy! raspberry jam! Do you think you are at your mother's? Don't you know that I have a sovereign objection to those two monosyllables, with which schoolboys cram their verses? haven't I told you so a hundred times already? "_Tacturas sidera summa putes_,"--what, do the waves on the coast of Sussex strike the stars, eh?--"_summa sidera_,"--who does not know that the stars are high? Where did you find that epithet?--in your _Gradus ad Parnassum_, I suppose. You will never mount so high. "_Putes!_" you may think this very fine, but to me it is all balderdash, hyperbolical stuff. There' (with a final box on the little fellow's nearest ear), 'go now, sir, and see if you can't write something better!'

It is consolatory to reflect that, though he should not have been cuffed and exposed to the riotous ridicule of his school-fellows for writing Latin verses as badly as Ovid wrote them, the culprit merited some kind of punishment for 'giving in' as his own the verses that were not his own,--an act of deception common enough with schoolboys, but scarcely reconcilable with the severe truthfulness, which is said (by the Shelleyan enthusiasts) to have distinguished him from his childhood to his last hour. 'He was,' says Lady Shelley in her _Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources_, 'more outspoken and truth-loving than other boys.'

With this anecdote of Latin verses, given in to the Doctor of the Brentford school, may be coupled a story, which the late Mr. Gellibrand used to tell, somewhat to the discredit of little Bysshe. Just about Shelley's age, though placed in a lower form of the school than Shelley's, Gellibrand was trying to put together a nonsense Latin verse in the way of scholastic duty, when Bysshe said, 'Give me your slate, and I will do it for you and you can go.' Trusting his friend, Gellibrand surrendered his slate and went off to play. The verses Shelley wrote on the slate ran,--

'Hos ego versiculos scripsi, Sed non ego feci.'

On being 'given in,' by a boy who could not make a nonsense 'line' without racking his brain, these verses may well have attracted the master's attention. To the question, 'Did you write this?' Gellibrand of course answered 'Yes.' Of course, also, the matter was inquired into further; the result being that Gellibrand received a whipping, for which he paid Shelley out with a 'pummelling.'

Though heavy, the blows he received for the Jam-jam verses were by no means the sharpest and most penetrating that came from time to time to little Bysshe Shelley from the same hand. Eighty years since our boys were taken from the nursery and confided to the schoolmaster, in the same way that pups of choicest breed were given over to the very slender mercy of the under-gamekeeper. In either case it was known what was in store for the young and helpless creatures. It was needful for these young things to be licked into shape and form and good behaviour,--for the small boys to be whipt into bigger boys, and then into serviceable men; and for the young dogs to be whipt into good sporting dogs. Relying on the wisdom of his ancestors, the English gentleman believed in the Coptic proverb, which declares that 'the stick came down from heaven,' To train boys and dogs the stick was needful. Whilst the tender-hearted father hoped silently that much of the stick would not be needed, the father of no more than average humanity was jubilant about the stick, confident that youngsters needed it, jocular about its power to do them good. Like George the Third, who told his sons' tutors to whip them when they wanted it (but for this order, how badly George the Fourth might have turned out!). Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P. for New Shoreham, sent little Bysshe to Sion House, with the understanding that he would be whipt, and well whipt too, when he wanted it. Mrs. Shelley knew what was in store for the little fellow, when she put the plum-cake into his box and hoped he would enjoy it. The foreknowledge did not make the lady sorrowful. Was it not written, that to spare the rod was to spoil the child? It is hard on schoolmasters that they should be required to bear the odium of an educational method, so universally approved two generations since, and sanctioned by the highest authority.

Elderly (not to say old) gentlemen of 'the old school' still talk and write cheerily of the good old birch. In his later novels the late Lord Lytton uttered several pleasantries about the antique instrument of domestic torture. But he probably took another view of the matter, when he was under it. Though the great Thackeray wrote with characteristic sprightliness and piquancy of interviews with 'the Doctor' in his study,--interviews attended with swishing sounds and shrill cries of puerile protest, audible through the strong doors of the same awful room,--he was alive to the tragic side of the comic business. Only a few years before his death, he spoke to an attentive mahogany-tree of one of these 'interviews with the Doctor,' in which he had figured as passive principal at a preparatory school, where he acquired some of the rudiments of human knowledge, before going to Charterhouse. 'And can you still remember what it felt like?' inquired one of the listeners. 'Remember it! It was like ----!' screamed the witness to his own early grief, raising his voice and eyebrows till they were comically eloquent of pain and affright, as he named a place whither so excellent a novelist cannot be supposed to have gone. Like little Makepeace, little Bysshe had interviews with the Doctor between the four walls of the Doctor's study,--interviews from which the nervous boy retired, with fury and horror in his face and at his heart, to the schoolroom full of heartless boys, whose only expression of concern at his misadventure was to ask him 'how he liked it.' All this is so much a matter of course that nothing would be said of it in these pages, were it not for the general opinion that this medicine of childhood (as an old writer pleasantly designates the discipline of the rod) not only caused the future poet the usual amount of transient physical annoyance, but had also an enduring and by no means beneficial effect on his temper and his disposition towards every kind of human government. It has been urged by successive biographers that this bitter physic, instead of curing his infantile ill-humours, aggravated them seriously, and was one of the several influences that set him at war with society from the outset of his career. Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley (the poet's second wife and his daughter-in-law) both take this view of the discipline that vexed him both at Brentford and Eton. And though he does not hold the birch largely accountable for _Queen Mab_, the present writer is by no means certain that the two ladies are so entirely wrong on this matter, as they are on other matters of the poet's character and story.

Notwithstanding the incidents, which may have disposed him to rate his Brentford preceptor as one of his earlier tyrants, there is evidence that, after coming to manhood, Shelley remembered Dr. Greenlaw with qualified approval, if not with affection. As they walked past the gloomy brick house to which he had just called his companion's attention, Shelley 'spoke of the master, Doctor Greenlaw, not without respect, saying, "he was a hard-headed Scotchman, and man of rather liberal opinions."' To be tinctured with liberality of sentiment was, in Shelley's opinion, to have a quality of goodness.

If Medwin was justified in saying that 'Sion House was a perfect hell' to Shelley, it is probable that the bullies of the playground were more accountable than the discipline of the schoolroom for the boy's hatred of the place. Numbering about sixty scholars, some of whom were seventeen or eighteen years old, the school--governed out of school-hours by bullies, who might bully any one weak enough to be bullied, instead of by 'masters' entitled to bully only their own fags--was just the place to be fruitful of misery for a shy, nervous, mammy-sick lad; lacking the muscle and pluck to hold his own with boys of his own age. On appearing for the first time in the playground--fenced with four high walls, and adorned with the solitary tree, to which the school-bell was hung--the child from Field Place found himself surrounded by a mob of inquisitive urchins, who at a glance saw he had neither the strength nor the courage to answer a rough word with a ready blow. Could he play at pegtop? at marbles? at hopscotch? at cricket? As each of these questions was answered in the negative, a cry of derision went up from his inquisitors. His girlish looks and long hair, his red-and-white complexion and the slightness of his long (not oval) face provoked uncomplimentary criticism. Then came questions about his home. Had he any sisters? What were their names? Where did they live? Had he a mother? What was his father? What was he 'blubbing' about? On hearing that his father was a Member of Parliament, some of the boys (possibly the tradesmen's sons) intimated that he had better not give himself airs.

Resembling Byron in divers matters already submitted to the reader's consideration, and in other matters to be noticed in later pages of this work, Shelley resembled him also, from childhood to his latest hour, in being a singular combination of feminine weakness and masculine strength. Remarkable for boyish resoluteness and energy, the Byron of Aberdeen, Harrow, and Cambridge, was no less remarkable for girlish sensibility and softness. Feminine in the emotional forces of his nature, the Byron of 'the Pilgrimage,' the London drawing-rooms, the Italian exile, and the expedition to Greece, was rich also in manly daring and combativeness. A similar account may be given of Shelley's constitution and temper. In his earlier time a boy on one side of his nature, he was a girl on the other. If 'his port' (to use Hogg's words) 'had the meekness of a maiden' in his later time, it possessed also the dignity of manliness. In moments of sudden peril it was discovered that fear had no chamber in the heart, of which Hogg wrote 'the heart of the young virgin, who had never crossed her father's threshold to encounter the rude world, could not be more susceptible of all the sweet charities than his.' It is remarkable how these two inseparable poets (inseparable for ever! notwithstanding all the efforts of the Shelleyan enthusiasts to disassociate them) impressed their closest friends alternately by their manliness and their womanliness. The biographer, who is eloquent about the manliness of Shelley's carriage, could not recall this friend of his heart and holder of his admiration, without remembering his meek and maidenly bearing and virginal sensibility. Even when he was bearing testimony to Byron's manly endowments, Hobhouse could not refrain from glancing at those of the poet's weaknesses, that, resembling 'a portion of his virtues, were of a feminine character--so that the affection felt for him was as that for a favourite and sometimes froward sister.'

At Brentford the girlish elements of Bysshe's nature were in the ascendant, the masculine elements altogether in abeyance. Possibly the latter elements had never manifested themselves at Field Place, where the little fellow, with younger sisters for his playmates, had lived at the end of his mother's apron-string something too long. If they had shown themselves in his earlier childhood, they seem to have retired from view during his stay at Dr. Greenlaw's school. Bearing a stronger likeness to the Geordie Byron, of Aberdeen High School, who fell a-weeping before his classmates, on being required for the first time to answer to the proud title of 'Dominus,' than to the Geordie Byron of the same school, who, notwithstanding his lameness, used to spring (in his hopping way) with clenched fists and flashing eyes at boys of superior size and strength, little Bysshe seems throughout his time at Sion House to have justified the disdain in which he was held, alike by the big and the small bullies of the dismal playground, as a chicken-heart and a milk-sop. His old schoolfellow, Gellibrand, who died something over twelve months in his ninety-third year, used to describe the Shelley of Dr. Greenlaw's seminary as a 'girl in boy's clothes, fighting with open hands and rolling on the floor when flogged, not from the pain, but "from a sense of indignity."' (_Vide_ Mr. Augustine Birrell's letter to the _Athenæum_ of 3rd May, 1884.)

Scared and cowed by the first greetings of the playground, he seems never to have gained heart to learn the games, of which he had been compelled to confess a shameful ignorance, or to repay with boyish energy and in proper style the snubs and blows of boys as small as himself. Every boy's hand was raised against him; and when he raised his own in retaliation, it was to slap with open palm. What the big bullies bade him do, he did meekly and often to his cost. When they ordered him to run after their balls, he obeyed till he was ready to drop with fatigue. When they ordered him to fetch books from the circulating library, to 'truck' Latin dictionaries and other scholastic volumes (appraised by avoirdupois weight) with the grocer for lumps of cheese or sweetstuff, he broke bounds and did their commands, earning once and again a smart punishment 'from the Doctor,' by his submissiveness to lawless orders. But he never joined of his own will in the pastimes of his schoolfellows, great or small. Moping in corners by himself, when the other boys were playing clamorously at prisoners' bars or leap-frog, with their marbles or their tops, he counted the days till next breaking-up day, recalled the pleasures of the garden where his little sisters had been his sturdiest playmates, or conned the pages of stories, borrowed from the circulating library. Sometimes on half-holidays he loitered for the hour together under the southern wall of the playground, as far as possible out of the way of his uncongenial companions. Sometimes out of pity for the child's solitariness and misery, Medwin left the sports of the yard, and walked with his little cousin to and fro under the high wall. It pleased the senior cousin long after the younger cousin's death to imagine, that Shelley was mindful of these walks and the kindness thus shown him when, in the description of an antique group, he wrote, 'Look, the figures are walking with a sauntering and idle pace, and talking to each other as they walk, as you may have seen a younger and an elder boy at school, walking in some grassy spot of the playground, with that tender friendship for each other which the age inspires.'

In this stage of his existence, little Bysshe resembled Geordie Byron at a somewhat earlier age, in having the nervous diathesis that often disposes children to walk in their sleep, when suffering from derangement of the stomach. At least, on one occasion, Geordie Byron was a somnambulist at Aberdeen. At least, on one occasion, Bysshe Shelley was a somnambulist during the time he passed under Dr. Greenlaw's government. More than forty years later, Medwin remembered how the boy looked, when after leaving his proper bedroom he advanced with slow steps, one summer night, to the open window of the dormitory he had no right to enter. Seeing that he was asleep, and unaware that sleep-walkers should be awakened gradually, Medwin jumped from bed and, seizing him quickly, roused the somnambulist with a suddenness that gave him a painful shock, attended with severe nervous erethism. In the morning Shelley paid another penalty for the misbehaviour of his nerves. Boys taken at night in a wrong bed-room were offenders against a wholesome domestic rule, to be punished even though the offence was unintentional. 'I remember,' says Medwin, 'that he was severely punished for this involuntary transgression.' It does not appear how he was punished, or whether it was known to the punisher that the breach of law had been committed during sleep.

Though he was not guilty of another walk in his sleep, the nervous and delicate boy was still visited by 'waking dreams, a sort of lethargy and abstraction that became habitual to him.' Whilst he was under the influence of these day-dreams, his prominent blue eyes were glazed with a peculiar dullness, and were equally inexpressive and insensible of external objects. As soon as the visitations were over, his eyes flashed, his lips quivered, and he spoke with a tremulous voice that was strangely and painfully indicative of nervous agitation and distress. 'A sort of ecstasy,' says Medwin, 'came over him, and he talked more like a spirit or an angel than a human being.' As the words convey the intended impression, there is no need to inquire in what respect the speech of a human creature differs from the speech of a spirit, or to imagine the circumstances under which Mr. Medwin may have been permitted to overhear the talk of angels.

Under the manifold vexations and sorrows that preyed upon his feelings at Sion House, Shelley found solace and intermissions of grief in the perusal of blue books,--no folios of parliamentary manufacture and information; but the little blue-covered volumes of extremely exciting and unwholesome prose-fiction, that were to be bought at sixpence a-piece of ordinary booksellers in the earlier decades of the present century. He was also a greedy devourer of tales (touching haunted castles, magicians, picturesque brigands, and mysterious murderers) that proceeded from writers, who did not condescend to offer their productions to the public eye, in the vulgar little 'blue books,' or in any form less acceptable to connoisseurs of elegant literature than board-bound volumes. It is something to the honour of prose-fiction that the two greatest poets of the nineteenth century may be said to have been mentally suckled and reared on novels from infancy to adult age,--taught by novels how to think and feel, and how to make others think and feel. It is alike true of Byron and Shelley, that the germs of much that is most delightful and admirable in their finest poems must be sought in old novels. John Moore's _Zeluco_ was not more influential in the production of _Childe Harold_, than _Zofloya or the Moor_ was influential in the production of _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_, those crude and unutterably ridiculous achievements of Shelley's youthful pen, which, offering to their amused perusers the feeble fancies and puerile conceits that, appearing and reappearing in successive volumes, developed eventually into vigorous creations and exquisite examples of poetic imagery,--exhibit also the rude notions and embryonic reasonings, that in the course of a few years grew and shaped themselves in the fundamental principles and main features of his philosophy on matters pertaining to politics, social economy, and religion.

It is a question whether the recollections of misery endured at school, which occupy three of the familiar stanzas to 'Mary,' should be regarded as reminiscences of trials the poet underwent at Sion House, or of sorrows that moved him to tears at Eton. Mrs. Shelley had no doubt the stanzas referred to the public school; and Lady Shelley is no less confident that her father-in-law was thinking of the Eton playing-grounds, when he wrote in the dedicatory prelude to _Laon and Cythna_:

'Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass; I do remember well the hour which burst My spirit's sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was, When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, And wept, I knew not why; until there rose From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas! Were but one echo from a world of woes-- The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

'And then I clasped my hands and looked around, But none was near to mock my streaming eyes, Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground-- So without shame, I spake:--"I will be wise, And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies Such power, for I grow weary to behold The selfish and the strong still tyrannise, Without reproach or check." I then controuled My tears; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.

'And from that hour did I with earnest thought Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore; Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught I cared to learn, but from that secret store Wrought linked-armour for my soul, before It might walk forth to war upon mankind; Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more Within me, till there came upon my mind A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.'

It has been usual with Shelley's biographers to deal with these verses as though, besides referring to Eton, they afford a substantially accurate account of trouble undergone, resolutions formed, and action taken by the poet whilst he was at Eton. To the Shelleyan enthusiasts, it is heresy to question the strict and severe historic veracity of any particular statement of this piece of melodious egotism. To them it is an affair of certainty that the grass glittered, the boy wept, the voices came from the school-house, the weeping youth made virtuous resolves, precisely as, and when, the poetry represents. The verses are given in evidence that Shelley neglected Latin and Greek in order that he might devote all his best energies to chemistry, astronomy, electricity, pneumatics,--in brief, to those 'scientific pursuits,' about which so much fantastic nonsense has been printed by the more fervid and less discreet of his eulogists. To this way of reading and handling these verses, is mainly referable the equally general and false notion that Shelley's principal employment at Eton was to make 'linked armour for his soul' out of materials prohibited to ingenuous youth by the teachers of his despotic school,--and that his one purpose in forging this linked armour for his soul, was that he might equip himself for 'walking forth to war among mankind,' _i.e._ for playing the part of a political revolutionist and social reformer, as soon as he should be his own master.

There is the less need to trouble oneself seriously with the question whether the verses refer to Sion House or Eton, because it is certain they do not correspond, in all their chief particulars, to his life at either school. Whilst it is certain that his studies at the private school were the studies prescribed by Dr. Greenlaw (unless the not-actually-prohibited perusal of novels is to be rated as 'study'), it is no less certain that he never grossly neglected the studies of either school. Far from neglecting the ordinary scholastic exercises of an Eton boy in the degree implied by the words,

'Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught I cared to learn,'

it is certain that, without holding steadily a high place in any of the higher forms, he acquired something more than a fair amount of the only learning imparted to boys at Eton eighty years since, and displayed remarkable aptitude and skill in making Latin verses,--an important part of what his tyrants knew and taught. The evidence is conclusive that, at Eton he was a facile and clever maker of Latin verses. Medwin speaks to 'his capacity for writing Latin verses,' and gives some examples of the capacity, that may, at least, be styled creditable performances for a public school-boy. Long after his abrupt withdrawal from the school, the excellence of Shelley's Latin verses was remembered by old Etonians. Whilst his readiness in the verse-maker's art was described as 'wonderful' by Mr. Packe, another of his former schoolmates at Eton (Mr. Walter S. Halliday) wrote of the same faculty to Lady Shelley, 'his power of Latin versification' was 'marvellous.' Hogg certifies that, though more than a year elapsed between his retirement from Eton and his going into residence at University College--a period during which he certainly omitted to enlarge his classical attainments--Shelley came up to Oxford an expert and singularly quick Latin verse-maker, and a ready writer of Latin prose. So much for the poet's vaunt that he did not care to learn what the Eton masters could teach him.

On the other hand, it is certain that, whilst carrying away from Eton something more than a creditable amount of the learning to be acquired in the classes, Shelley learnt nothing at the school by irregular and unrecognized study to justify the assertion that, whilst a schoolboy, he gathered 'knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,' and armed himself for the battle of life with weapons his official teachers would fain have kept from his hands. His scientific studies were the mere sports of a schoolboy, playing idly with an air-pump, an electrical battery, and a few acids and alkalies. Instead of spending his leisure at Eton in the serious pursuits of natural science, he employed it chiefly in literary essays, that show him to have been possessed by an ambition scarcely compatible with an enthusiasm for scientific investigation and a yearning for scientific celebrity.

That both Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley had considerable, though insufficient, grounds for regarding the dedicatory stanzas as a record of the poet's experiences at Eton, is unquestionable. Mrs. Shelley could, doubtless, have defended her view of the verses with words spoken by her husband, who entertained her with several equally strange and delusive stories of his life at the public school. Besides the poet's authority, Lady Shelley could, perhaps, produce other evidence to justify her concurrence with Mrs. Shelley's opinion. Whilst he deems it possible that Shelley was thinking more of Eton than Brentford, when he committed the verses to paper, the present writer has no doubt whatever that the poet, soon after their composition and ever afterwards, regarded the three stanzas as veracious autobiography--as a faithful poetical record of what he had suffered, resolved, and done, when he was under Dr. Keate's rigorous government. But the poet's words may not be produced as sure evidence respecting the tenor and chief incidents of his career. From manhood's threshold to his last hour, he was subject to strange delusions about his own story; some of the marvellous misconceptions having reference to matters of quite recent occurrence. 'Had he,' says Hogg, 'written to ten different individuals the history of some proceeding in which he was himself a party and an eye-witness, each of his ten reports would have varied from the rest in essential and important circumstances. The relation given on the morrow would be unlike that of to-day, as the latter would contradict the tale of yesterday.' Peacock, who also knew and loved him well, bears similar testimony to the looseness and inaccuracy of the poet's statements about his own affairs, even about those of his affairs, respecting which (had he been a man of ordinary exactness and fidelity to facts) he would be naturally regarded as the best source of information. To escape the disagreeable necessity of thinking him deliberately untruthful, Thomas Love Peacock had recourse to the notion that his friend was the victim of 'semi-delusions.' With all his desire to palliate his friend's besetting frailty, so as to relieve it of the odium of sheer untruthfulness, Peacock, in his inability to rate the delusive fancies as sincere and perfect delusions, came to the conclusion that they were only 'semi-delusions;' that the mis-statements of the poet's mouth and pen were referable in equal proportions to delusive fancy and influences distinct from delusion. Whatever their show of autobiographic purport and sincerity, it is obvious that the verses of a poet, suffering from so perplexing an infirmity, differ widely in evidential value from the autobiographic statements of an ordinary individual.

How far the Byronic poems should be held accountable for Shelley's Byronic way of dealing with his personal story in poems offered to the world, is a question deserving more consideration than can be given to it in this chapter. At this early point of an attempt to exhibit 'the Real Shelley,' it is, however, well to indicate why criticism should deal with the egotisms of the Shelleyan poems precisely as criticism has long dealt with the egotisms of the Byronic poems.

However people may differ about the respective merits of the two poets, all persons must allow that Byron and Shelley were both egotists in the superlative degree,--and that differing from other poets in more unusual and admirable qualities, they differ from them also in surcharging their magnificent poetry with more or less misleading references to their private concerns, and with emotion and sentiment arising from their purely personal interests,--often from their purely personal discontents. In this respect, both poets strayed from the high poetic path; sacrificing art to egotism, fame to foible, greatness to vanity. If _Childe Harold_ was the wail of a single romantic sufferer for his own sake, _Laon and Cythna_ was the cry of a single romantic sufferer for his own as well as the world's sake. The poet's personality is forced upon the reader's notice no less resolutely in Shelley's than in Byron's poem. If it was Byron's vanity to demand human sympathy as the victim of fate, it was Shelley's vanity to solicit it as the victim of persecution.

Whilst the man of sin and mystery invited the world to admire his proud endurance of the doom that distinguished him from all other mortals, the angel of goodness and light invited mankind to worship him, for his unselfishness, his impatience of evil, his abhorrence of oppression, his ineffable benevolence, his heroic readiness to perish for the good of his species. Both actors were equals in sincerity and in dishonesty. The man who has still to discover that sincerity underlies almost every display of human affectation, is a man who has failed in justice to a considerable proportion of his species. The pretender ever plays the character he desires in the most secret chamber of his heart to be mistaken for. Byron and Shelley were alike actors and alike sincere, each taking a part accordant with his conceptions of the sublime and admirable in human nature. In assuming the character of a libertine,

'A shameless wight, Sore given to revel and ungodly glee,'

Byron assumed the character that interested and fascinated him. In assuming the character of the social martyr, Shelley, true to his own nature, selected the character that appeared to him the most admirable. Both characters were taken from the marvellous creations of the romantic literature on which the two poets fed from childhood to years of discretion. It was a literature that may be styled the romantic literature of the good principle and the evil principle. In taking a representative of the evil principle for his model, Byron displayed his genuine disposition which, in spite of his engaging qualities and several generous endowments, was a disposition towards evil. In determining to be a representative of the good principle of human existence, as that existence was exhibited in the 'blue books,' and other literature of the circulating libraries, Shelley made a choice no less true to his own more gentle and earnest nature. Mere boys when they forced themselves into notoriety, neither of them could readily relinquish the part,--chosen so easily and naturally. Shelley determined to be on the side of the angels, because his disposition was in the main towards goodness; Byron went with the devils, because he found them upon the whole better and more congenial company than the angels of light.

In other respects, their resemblance was striking. Endowed with a memory that equalled Byron's memory in retentiveness, though more liable to illusions, an imagination even more powerful than Byron's imagination, and a sensibility no less acute than Byron's sensibility, Shelley resembled Byron also in his habit of brooding over old sorrows, intensifying them by the exercise of fancy, and using them as instruments of self-torture. Certainly in some degree, probably in a high degree, this habit is referable to the influence of Byron's genius,--to the influence of the Byronic poems, and also of their popularity. Whilst success never fails to produce imitators, the affectations of the successful are curiously infectious. This was notably the case with Byron's success, that putting the younger poets and poetasters into turn-down collars, caused them to train their voices to notes of what they deemed Byronic melancholy, and to set their features into what they deemed expressions of Byronic bitterness, and melancholy. It is not suggested that Shelley was for a single minute one of the Byro-maniacal apes. It is not hinted that he ever imitated Byron, except in the way in which a loyal, enthusiastic, and altogether honest disciple may be seen to imitate a great master.

From his boyhood to his last year, Shelley regarded Byron with a generous admiration, that once and again expressed itself in almost idolatrous language. Unlike the Shelleyan fanatics, who seek to exalt their favourite by decrying the only modern English poet likely to be rated as his superior, Shelley ever regarded Byron as the greatest living master of their art. Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Keats, Tom Moore, Leigh Hunt, to say nothing of minor minstrels, all had a share of Shelley's never-stinted homage, but he never for any long time thought of putting the best and strongest of them on equality with the incomparable Byron. To remember the terms in which he wrote and spoke of Byron, is to think with a smile of all that has been written in these later years by poetasters and critics to Byron's discredit.

The enthusiasts, who have so clear a perception of the signs of Shelley's influence over Byron in the Third Canto of _Childe Harold_, are curiously blind to the far more important and conspicuous indications of Byron's influence on Shelley in _Laon and Cythna_. When the most has been said of the manifestations of Shelleyan thought in Byron's poem, it cannot be questioned that had the younger of the two poets never lived, the four Cantos of _Childe Harold_ would have been substantially the same poem they now are. On the other hand, it is impossible for any one but a Shelleyan enthusiast to believe that _Laon and Cythna_ would have been the same poem it now is, had Byron never come into existence. Written in the summer of 1817, when the poet had been for five years, like all the younger poets of his time, living under the domination of Byron's intellect, and had been for a still longer period an enthusiastic admirer of Byron's writings; written in the summer following the one in which the still youthful aspirant to poetical renown had come under the personal influence of the great poet, whom he had so long desired to know personally, and had made at least one futile attempt to approach, _Laon and Cythna_ bears the most distinct marks of Byron's influence in Shelley's selection of the Spenserian measure, in the poem's Byronic egotisms, and in the pains taken by the poet to identify himself with the hero of the narrative. In all these particulars (to say nothing of other particulars which the reader of these pages can discover for himself), _Laon and Cythna_ resembles _Childe Harold_, just as the painting by a young artist, abounding in originality and natural vigour, is often seen to resemble the painting of an older artist, whose notions and treatment of colour, and whose manipulatory address, have been a manifest force in the aspirant's education. Just as the painting of the younger artist in form and colour, without being either 'a copy,' or even 'an imitation,' in any dishonourable sense of the term, bears to the painting of the master a certain resemblance (of tone and treatment) that causes both works to be regarded in later times as 'works of the same school,' Shelley's great poem resembles Byron's great poem.

Byron was in no degree accountable either for the 'story' of Shelley's poem, or for its incidents and conceptions of character. The same may be said of the prevailing sentiments, subordinate aims, and main purpose of the poem. Whilst the prevailing sentiments of the poem are altogether foreign to Byron's views on the religious, political, and social questions dealt with in _Laon and Cythna_, his writings are in evidence that he must have regarded Shelley's approval of 'Laon's' incest with his own sister as revolting in the highest degree. But though the substance of this extraordinary poem could not have proceeded from Byron's brain and pen, the form of the work is distinctly Byronic. Shelley cannot have been unconscious of this resemblance of his poem to what was at that time Byron's greatest achievement in song. _Qui s'excuse s'accuse._ The very words of the Preface, in which he anticipates a charge of 'presuming to enter into competition with our greatest contemporary poets,' and, whilst disclaiming the presumption, declares his 'unwillingness to tread in the footsteps of any who preceded him,' are words of evidence that he was fully and uneasily alive to the resemblance. His curious way of accounting for his choice of the measure which Byron's poem had rendered more popular for the moment than any other measure, is only the poet's attempt to shut his eyes to the fact, that he selected the measure because _Childe Harold_ had rendered it more agreeable to his own ear than any other, and had also made it the measure most likely to commend his poem to the public taste. 'I have,' he says, 'adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical harmony than the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but because in the latter, there is no shelter for mediocrity; you must either succeed or fail.' Though Byron doubtless smiled at this reason for the adoption of the measure, which he had in a certain sense made his own, he must have been gratified by the delicate compliment to the poet who had adopted it with success.

Using the Byronic measure (for the Spenserian measure had become for the moment Byron's property), Shelley made a Byronic use of matter taken from romances devoured in his childhood. 'Treading in the footsteps' of his master, notwithstanding his assertions to the contrary, Shelley followed the Byronic example in attaching his own personality to the hero of his poem. Not content with hinting poetically in the Dedicatory Stanzas to Mary that he and Laon are one, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ is at pains to declare more fully and precisely in the prose of his Preface that Laon's views on matters of religion and politics, on questions of government and misgovernment, on the vices of ecclesiasticism and the merits of vegetarianism, on the relations of the sexes and the æsthetics of love, are the views of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., who has studied human nature in Switzerland as well as England, and who, in consideration of his 'having trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc,' should be regarded as a gentleman especially educated and peculiarly qualified to dogmatize on such matters to English persons who have never crossed the Channel. Both in the poem and dedicatory prelude he seizes every opportunity to impress on the reader that Percy Bysshe Shelley is Laon, the apostle of 'Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,' and that this Preacher of the 'New Evangel,' who at the close of the poem sails into Paradise with his sister and the offspring of their incestuous intercourse in a boat made of

'one curved shell of hollow pearl, Almost translucent with the light divine Of her within,'

is no other than Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., eldest son of the Member of Parliament for New Shoreham, and heir-apparent to a Sussex baronetcy. In these Shelleyan egotisms the critical reader of the marvellous poem recognizes the very touch and trick of Byron's way of dressing up details of his domestic woes and personal story for the delight and mystification of his readers. One of the most pathetic and effective of the egotisms is the poet's account of the misery he endured from hard-hearted masters and malicious boys whilst he was at school.

Just as Byron seasoned the introductory stanzas of _Childe Harold's_ first canto with more or less imaginary particulars of his misspent youth, when

'Few earthly things found favour in his sight, Save concubines and carnal companie, And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree,'

Shelley seasoned the dedicatory verses of _Laon and Cythna_ with references to the wretchedness that preyed upon him when, walking forth upon the glittering grass, he wept and

'knew not why; until there rose From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas! Were but one echo from a world of woes-- The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.'

Both descriptions were equally truthful and untruthful. The basis of truth in Byron's poetical narrative of his misspent youth is that he kept the girl at Brompton who used to ride and walk about London in boy's clothes, and that when he entertained three or four old college friends at Newstead, they talked a good deal of nonsense and drank rather more champagne than was good for them. The basis of truth in Shelley's narrative of his wretched boyhood is that he was often unhappy at school (_very_ unhappy at Brentford), and that being of a soft and girlish temperament when he was at Sion House, he sometimes fell a-weeping because the 'boys were so unkind to him.' The Shelleyan narrative is not historically exact to his doings and experiences in either of his two schools. At Brentford he was not remarkably insubordinate (as he was at Eton), and did nothing to give the faintest justificatory colour to his vaunt of having devoted himself to studies prohibited or discountenanced by the masters of the establishment. At Eton (where, though often unhappy, he was less given to crying than in his Brentford days), instead of neglecting the studies of the college, he attained to considerable excellence in them. Upon the whole, the weeping boy 'upon the glittering grass' bears more resemblance to the chicken-heart and milksop of Dr. Greenlaw's playground than to the unruly, fitfully riotous, and inordinately blasphemous young rascal, who was eliminated from Eton with the least possible disgrace, even as in later time he was expelled in an irregular way, and with no needless humiliation, from Oxford. And in consideration of this greater resemblance, the present writer has thought right to deal, in this chapter about the Brentford schoolboy, with the verses that, in Mrs. Shelley's opinion and Lady Shelley's opinion, are a faithful picture of the lad at Eton.

It is certain that the little Bysshe was an unhappy child at Sion House, even to the time of his withdrawal from the school, when he had grown almost too tall, though certainly not too robust, to be called 'little.' But miserable children are curiously, pathetically clever in escaping from their misery. The smart of them over, Bysshe soon dismissed from his mind those disagreeable visits to the Doctor's study. In the pages of his ghost-stories and banditti-stories, his tales of satanic malice and knightly heroism, he forgot all about those very unkind boys. Most of those delightful books he borrowed from the circulating library, but doubtless he had in his schoolroom 'locker' his own copies of his favourite novels. It cannot be questioned he had a peculiar and inalienable copy of _Zofloya, or The Moor_, which, yielding flowers of romance to be found in the ineffably absurd novels which he published in the opening term of his literary career, gave him also fine pieces of descriptive writing that, after doing service in _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_, were worked with skilful art into the lofty song of _Laon and Cythna_.

The urchin enjoyed his frequent walks under the playground's southern wall with his cousin Tom Medwin, till the latter left Dr. Greenlaw's sadly plebeian school, and went off to the public school which prepared him for Oxford. Though he cannot rely so confidently as he could wish on Tom Medwin's assurance, the present writer likes to imagine Mr. Medwin had better ground than his treacherous memory for saying that, when they were schoolfellows at Sion House, he and his young cousin more than once played the truant; and rowing on the river more than once to Kew, went on one occasion by water to Richmond, where they visited the theatre and saw Mrs. Jordan in the 'Country Girl.' One would fain believe this of the little boy who, on growing to be a man, disliked the theatre almost as cordially as he had in former time hated Professor Sala's dancing academy.

But one hesitates to trust in this matter to the biographer who seems to have erred in recording that Shelley acquired a taste for boating, even at a time considerably prior to the period in which this secret and lawless trip to the Richmond Theatre is said to have been made. Peacock, who can scarcely have been mistaken, was certain the poet's 'affection for boating began at a much later date' than his time at Eton. Walter S. Halliday (Shelley's friend at the public school) was no less certain, in February, 1857, that at Eton Shelley 'never joined in the usual sports of the boys, and, what is remarkable, never went out in a boat on the river.' Had Shelley enjoyed boating at Sion House, it is inconceivable that he (so passionately fond of the water in later time) would have avoided the river, or could have been kept from it at Eton. As Halliday was no such reliable authority as successive writers have thought, I should have hesitated to prefer his evidence to Medwin's testimony on this point, had not the Etonian witness been so emphatically sustained by Love Peacock. In regard to what he says of Shelley's boating at Brentford, Mr. Medwin professes to speak from his own knowledge. On the other hand, he acknowledges that, with respect to the poet's alleged love of boating at Eton, he speaks on the worst possible authority--the poet's own equally delusive and retentive memory. 'He told me,' says Medwin, _vide_ _The Life_, v. I., p. 52, 'the greatest delight he experienced at Eton was from boating, for which he had, as I have already mentioned, early acquired a taste.' Such unsupported evidence from Shelley is scarcely anything better than no evidence at all, on being opposed by such witnesses as Halliday and Peacock.

From this chapter on Shelley's school-days at Brentford, one should not omit a pleasant glimpse that is afforded of the boy (in the company of his cousins, the Groves, sons of Thomas Grove, of Fern House, Wiltshire, who married Charlotte Pilford, sister of the poet's mother) by a letter, dated to Hogg, February 16th, 1857, by Charles Henry Grove. At that date it was in the memory of Charles Henry Grove how, when a tender Harrovian, _ætat._ nine, he saw his cousin Bysshe for the first time. On this occasion the nine-year old Harrovian, attended by his brother George, _ætat._ ten, and protected by a sufficient body-servant, picked Bysshe up at Brentford and carried him off, on the roof of the stage-coach to Wiltshire, for the Easter holidays. It lived in Charles Grove's memory, how, during these holidays he and his brother joined Shelley in a feat of mischief that no doubt made the Squire of Fern wish them back at school. Acting on Bysshe's suggestion, the three took the carpenter's axes, and set to work cutting down some of the young fir-trees of Fern Park. As Charles Grove, _ætat._ nine at the time of this occurrence, was born in 1794 (_vide_ Burke's _Landed Gentry_), and Shelley was born in August, 1792, this pretty 'piece of boys' mischief' may be assigned to the Easter holidays of Bysshe's twelfth year,--_i.e._ Easter, 1804; about the middle of his whole time at Sion House.

It seems to have been towards the end of his time at Brentford, that Shelley experienced the delights of his tender attachment to the gentle schoolmate of his own age, with whom he used to hold romantic converse in the playground, and exchange 'good-night kisses' at the time for going to bed--the childish attachment so sweetly commemorated in the _Essay on Friendship_. What is the biographical value of that charming story, which one could believe no less readily than gladly, were it not told _of_ Shelley _by_ Shelley?

Had it proceeded from a man far less imaginative than Shelley, and far less prone to mistake the creations of his fancy for sincere recollections, no cautious reader would regard this pleasant record of infantile affection as faithful in every particular to the actual circumstances of the childish attachment. On the other hand, the coldest and most suspicious peruser will be disposed to think the story substantially truthful, due allowance being made for the force of imagination, the deceitfulness of the equally retentive and fallacious memory, and the peculiar infirmity of the man who could not be trusted to give twelve fairly consistent accounts of any matter, however much he might desire to be precisely accurate. It is in favour of this estimate of the story that the essayist's portraiture of his former self harmonizes with the several other accounts he has given elsewhere of his character in childhood. In his later time Shelley always thought of the child, from which he had developed, as a mild-mannered, tractable, gentle child. The attachment being remembered, as an affair of his twelfth or thirteenth year, it may be presumed to have stirred and held his heart towards the close of his time at Brentford,--probably after Tom Medwin (who says nothing of the matter) left Sion House. To see the Brentford schoolboy's prominent blue eyes overflowing with tears of delight, under the music of his friend's voice, to watch the two urchins exchanging kisses, is to remember the girlishness of Byron's early attachments, as well as the girlishness of his affectionate care for his Harrow 'favourites.' From his first to his last hour at Sion House the masculine forces of Bysshe's two-sided nature were in abeyance. He was a gentle English girl rather than a gentle English boy.

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