ctions of him, matter-of-fact as they are, may help to solve
the problem upon which many minds have been engaged without yet
having finished the work. For Shelley still remains before the
world misconceived because misdescribed; and if society is
gradually clearing its ideas of the man, it is not only because
the preconceptions of that multitudinous authority are themselves
gradually drifting away, but also because substantial facts are slowly
coming into view. Their development has been hindered by obstacles
which will be understood when I have proceeded a little farther, and
even within the compass of this brief sketch I hope that I shall be
able to make readers on both sides of the Atlantic work their own way
a little closer to the truth.

Shelley is still regarded by the majority, either as a victim of
persecution, or a rebel against authority, or both,--his friends
probably inclining to hold him up as a philosopher-patriot, whose
resistance to intellectual oppression placed him in the condition of
a martyr and robbed him of his fair share of life. My own earliest
memory presents him very much in that aspect. I first recall him
pale and slender, worn with anxiety, openly alluding to the marks of
premature age in his own aspect, bursting with aspirations against
tyranny of all kinds, and yielding to fits of dreadful despondency
under sufferings inflicted by the dignitaries of the land at the
instance of his own family. The circumstances by which he was
surrounded contributed to this guise of martyrdom.

My own earliest recollections began in prison, where my father[A]
was incarcerated for critical remarks which at the present day would
scarcely attract attention, and which were put forth in no impulse of
personal hostility, but under the strongest sense of duty, with the
desire to vindicate the constitutional freedom of England against the
perverted control of faction and the influences of a corrupt court. At
that time my father was accounted a man prone to mutiny against "the
powers that be," although his political opinions belonged to a class
which would now be regarded as too moderate for popular liberalism.
He has been censured for literary affectation and for personal
improvidence, but only by those who do not understand the real
elements of his character. The leading ideas of his mind were,
first, earnest duty to his country at any cost to himself; next, the
sacrifice of any ordinary consideration to personal