wing-rooms, where
he is ill at ease, liable to trip in the carpet and upset furniture.
Complete absence of self-consciousness, perfect disinterestedness, are
evident in every tone; it is clear that he is an aristocrat, but it is
also clear that he is a saint.

The catastrophe of expulsion from Oxford would have been impossible in
a well-regulated university, but Percy Bysshe Shelley could not have
fitted easily into any system. Born at Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, on
August 4, 1792, simultaneously with the French Revolution, he had more
than a drop of wildness in his blood. The long pedigree of the Shelley
family is full of turbulent ancestors, and the poet's grandfather, Sir
Bysshe, an eccentric old miser who lived until 1815, had been married
twice, on both occasions eloping with an heiress. Already at Eton
Shelley was a rebel and a pariah. Contemptuous of authority, he had gone
his own way, spending pocket-money on revolutionary literature, trying
to raise ghosts, and dabbling in chemical experiments. As often happens
to queer boys, his school-fellows herded against him, pursuing him with
blows and cries of "Mad Shelley." But the holidays were happy. There
must have been plenty of fun at Field Place when he told his sisters
stories about the alchemist in the attic or "the Great Tortoise that
lived in Warnham Pond," frightened them with electric shocks, and taught
his baby brother to say devil. There is something of high-spirited fun
even in the raptures and despairs of his first love for his cousin,
Harriet Grove. He tried to convert her to republican atheism, until
the family, becoming alarmed, interfered, and Harriet was disposed of
otherwise. "Married to a clod of earth!" exclaims Shelley. He spent
nights "pacing the churchyard," and slept with a loaded pistol and
poison beside him.

He went in to residence at University College, Oxford, in the Michaelmas
term of 1810. The world must always bless the chance which sent Thomas
Jefferson Hogg a freshman to the same college at the same time, and made
him Shelley's friend. The chapters in which Hogg describes their live at
Oxford are the best part of his biography. In these lively pages we see,
with all the force of reality, Shelley working by fits in a litter of
books and retorts and "galvanic troughs," and discoursing on the vast
possibilities of science for making mankind happy; how chemistry will
turn deserts into cornfields, and even the air and water will year