with such martinets of juvenile convention as a public school is wont to
breed. At Eton, as elsewhere, Shelley's uncompromising spirit brought
him into inconvenient contact with a world of vulgar usage, while his
lively fancy invested the commonplaces of reality with dark hues
borrowed from his own imagination. Mrs. Shelley says of him, "Tamed by
affection, but unconquered by blows, what chance was there that Shelley
should be happy at a public school?" This sentence probably contains the
pith of what he afterwards remembered of his own school life, and there
is no doubt that a nature like his, at once loving and high-spirited,
had much to suffer. It was a mistake, however, to suppose that at Eton
there were any serious blows to bear, or to assume that laws of love
which might have led a spirit so gentle as Shelley's, were adapted to
the common stuff of which the English boy is formed. The latter mistake
Shelley made continually throughout his youth; and only the advance of
years tempered his passionate enthusiasm into a sober zeal for the
improvement of mankind by rational methods. We may also trace at this
early epoch of his life that untamed intellectual ambition--that neglect
of the immediate and detailed for the transcendental and
universal--which was a marked characteristic of his genius, leading him
to fly at the highest while he overleaped the facts of ordinary human
life. "From his earliest years," says Mrs. Shelley, "all his amusements
and occupations were of a daring, and in one sense of the term, lawless
nature. He delighted to exert his powers, not as a boy, but as a man;
and so with manly powers and childish wit, he dared and achieved
attempts that none of his comrades could even have conceived. His
understanding and the early development of imagination never permitted
him to mingle in childish plays; and his natural aversion to tyranny
prevented him from paying due attention to his school duties. But he was
always actively employed; and although his endeavours were prosecuted
with puerile precipitancy, yet his aim and thoughts were constantly