Michelgrove Shelleys has passed from the condition of a probable and
obvious surmise into that of an established fact. The family traces up
to Sir William Shelley, Judge of the Common Pleas under Henry VII,
thence to a Member of Parliament in 1415, and to the reign of Edward I,
or even to the Norman Conquest. The Worminghurst Shelleys start with
Henry Shelley, who died in 1623. It will be sufficient here to begin
with the poet's grandfather, Bysshe Shelley. He was born at Christ
Church, Newark, North America, and raised to a noticeable height,
chiefly by two wealthy marriages, the fortunes of the junior branch.
Handsome, keen-minded, and adventurous, he eloped with Mary Catherine,
heiress of the Rev. Theobald Michell, of Horsham; after her death he
eloped with Elizabeth Jane, heiress of Mr. Perry, of Penshurst. By this
second wife he had a family, now represented, by the Baron de l'Isle and
Dudley: by his first wife he had (besides a daughter) a son Timothy, who
was the poet's father, and who became in due course Sir Timothy Shelley,
Bart., M.P. His baronetcy was inherited from his father Bysshe--on whom
it had been conferred, in 1806, chiefly through the interest of the Duke
of Norfolk, the head of the Whig party in the county of Sussex, to whose
politics the new baronet had adhered.

Mr. Timothy Shelley was a very ordinary country gentleman in essentials,
and a rather eccentric one in some details. He was settled at Field
Place, near Horsham, Sussex, and married Elizabeth, daughter of Charles
Pilfold, of Effingham, Surrey; she was a beauty, and a woman of good
abilities, but without any literary turn. Their first child was the
poet, Percy Bysshe, born at Field Place on Aug. 4, 1792: four daughters
also grew up, and a younger son, John: the eldest son of John is now the
Baronet, having succeeded, in 1889, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, the
poet's only surviving son. No one has managed to discover in the parents
of Percy Bysshe any qualities furnishing the prototype or the nucleus of