If any touch of the romantic which we find in Shelley is a matter
of heredity, we must trace it to this able, daring, restless, and
magnificent old grandfather, who was the beau ideal of an English
squire--the sort of squire who had added foreign graces to native
sturdiness. But young Shelley, the future poet, seemed scarcely to
be English at all. As a young boy he cared nothing for athletic
sports. He was given to much reading. He thought a good deal about
abstractions with which most schoolboys never concern themselves
at all.

Consequently, both in private schools and afterward at Eton, he
became a sort of rebel against authority. He resisted the fagging-
system. He spoke contemptuously of physical prowess. He disliked
anything that he was obliged to do, and he rushed eagerly into
whatever was forbidden.

Finally, when he was sent to University College, Oxford, he broke
all bounds. At a time when Tory England was aghast over the French
Revolution and its results, Shelley talked of liberty and equality
on all occasions. He made friends with an uncouth but able fellow
student, who bore the remarkable name of Thomas Jefferson Hogg--a
name that seems rampant with republicanism--and very soon he got
himself expelled from the university for publishing a little tract
of an infidel character called "A Defense of Atheism."

His expulsion for such a cause naturally shocked his father. It
probably disturbed Shelley himself; but, after all, it gave him
some satisfaction to be a martyr for the cause of free speech. He
went to London with his friend Hogg, and took lodgings there. He