h his letters show that he lacked the
rudiments alike of logic and of grammar. His religious opinions might be
summed up in Clough's epigram:--

At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world your friend.

His morality in like manner was purely conventional, as may be gathered
from his telling his eldest son that he would never pardon a
mesalliance, but would provide for as many illegitimate children as he
chose to have. For the rest, he appears to have been a fairly good
landlord, and a not unkind father, sociable and hospitable, somewhat
vain and occasionally odd in manner, but qualified for passing muster
with the country gentlemen around him. In the capacity to understand a
nature which deviated from the ordinary type so remarkably as Shelley's,
he was utterly deficient; and perhaps we ought to regard it as his
misfortune that fate made him the father of a man who was among the
greatest portents of originality and unconventionality that this century
has seen. Toward an ordinary English youth, ready to sow his wild oats
at college, and willing to settle at the proper age and take his place
upon the bench of magistrates, Sir Timothy Shelley would have shown
himself an indulgent father; and it must be conceded by the poet's
biographer that if Percy Bysshe had but displayed tact and consideration
on his side, many of the misfortunes which signalized his relations to
his father would have been avoided.

Shelley passed his childhood at Field Place, and when he was about six
years old began to be taught, together with his sisters, by Mr. Edwards,
a clergyman who lived at Warnham. What is recorded of these early years
we owe to the invaluable communications of his sister Hellen. The
difference of age between her and her brother Bysshe obliges us to refer
her recollections to a somewhat later period--probably to the holidays
he spent away from Sion House and Eton. Still, since they introduce us
to the domestic life of his then loved home, it may be proper to make
quotations from them in this place. Miss Shelley tells us her brother
"would frequently come to the nursery, and was full of a peculiar kind
of pranks. One piece of mischief, for which he was rebuked, was running
a stick through the ceiling of a low passage to find some new chamber,
which could be made effective for some flights of his vivid
imagination." He was very much attached to his sisters, and used to
entertain them with stories, in whi