if a fuller life had been allotted him, we have
the certainty that from the discords of his youth he would have wrought
a clear and lucid harmony.

These sentences form a somewhat gloomy prelude to a biography. Yet the
student of Shelley's life, the sincere admirer of his genius, is almost
forced to strike a solemn key-note at the outset. We are not concerned
with one whose "little world of man" for good or ill was perfected, but
with one whose growth was interrupted just before the synthesis of which
his powers were capable had been accomplished.

August 4, 1792, is one of the most memorable dates in the history of
English literature. On this day Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field
Place, near Horsham, in the county of Sussex. His father, named Timothy,
was the eldest son of Bysshe Shelley, Esquire, of Goring Castle, in the
same county. The Shelley family could boast of great antiquity and
considerable wealth. Without reckoning earlier and semi-legendary
honours, it may here be recorded that it is distinguished in the elder
branch by one baronetcy dating from 1611, and by a second in the younger
dating from 1806. In the latter year the poet's grandfather received
this honour through the influence of his friend the Duke of Norfolk. Mr.
Timothy Shelley was born in the year 1753, and in 1791 he married
Elizabeth, daughter of Charles Pilford, Esquire, a lady of great beauty,
and endowed with fair intellectual ability, though not of a literary
temperament. The first child of this marriage was the poet, named Bysshe
in compliment to his grandfather, the then living head of the family,
and Percy because of some remote connexion with the ducal house of
Northumberland. Four daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, Hellen, and Margaret,
and one son, John, who died in the year 1866, were the subsequent issue
of Mr. Timothy Shelley's marriage. In the year 1815, upon the death of
his father, he succeeded to the baronetcy, which passed, after his own
death, to his grandson, the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley, as the
poet's only surviving son.

Before quitting, once and for all, the arid region of genealogy, it may
be worth mentioning that Sir Bysshe Shelley by his second marriage with
Miss Elizabeth Jane Sydney Perry, heiress of Penshurst, became the
father of five children, the eldest son of whom assumed the name of
Shelley-Sidney, received a baronetcy, and left a son, Philip Charles
Sidney, who was created Lord De l'Isle and Dudley. S