This was, as is well known, patent in his life. It is as really, though
perhaps less obviously, manifest in his poetry, the sincere effluence of
his life. And it may not, therefore, be amiss to consider whether it was
conditioned by anything beyond his congenital nature. For our part, we
believe it to have been equally largely the outcome of his early and long
isolation. Men given to retirement and abstract study are notoriously
liable to contract a certain degree of childlikeness: and if this be the
case when we segregate a man, how much more when we segregate a child! It
is when they are taken into the solution of school-life that children, by
the reciprocal interchange of influence with their fellows, undergo the
series of reactions which converts them from children into boys and from
boys into men. The intermediate stage must be traversed to reach the
final one.

Now Shelley never could have been a man, for he never was a boy. And the
reason lay in the persecution which overclouded his school-days. Of that
persecution's effect upon him, he has left us, in _The Revolt of Islam_,
a picture which to many or most people very probably seems a poetical
exaggeration; partly because Shelley appears to have escaped physical
brutality, partly because adults are inclined to smile tenderly at
childish sorrows which are not caused by physical suffering. That he
escaped for the most part bodily violence is nothing to the purpose. It
is the petty malignant annoyance recurring hour by hour, day by day,
month by month, until its accumulation becomes an agony; it is this which
is the most terrible weapon that boys have against their fellow boy, who
is powerless to shun it because, unlike the man, he has virtually no
privacy. His is the torture which the ancients used, when they anointed
their victim with honey and exposed him naked to the restless fever of
the flies. He is a little St. Sebastian, sinking under the incessant