Some of their childish games at diabolical processions, making a
little hell of their own by burning a fagot stack, &c., shows how
early his searching mind dispersed the terrors, while it delighted in
the picturesque or fantastic images, of superstition. Few persons
realise to themselves how soon highly imaginative children may be
influenced by the superstitions they hear around them, and assuredly
Shelley's brain never recovered from some of these early influences:
the mind that could so quickly reason and form inferences would
naturally be of that sensitive and susceptible kind which would bear
the scar of bad education. Shelley's mother does not appear so much to
have had real good sense, as what is generally called common sense,
and thus she was incapable of understanding a nature like that of her
son; and thought more of his bringing home a well-filled game bag (a
thing in every way repulsive to Shelley's tastes) than of trying to
understand what he was thinking; so Shelley had to pass through
childhood, his sisters being his chief companions, as he had no
brother till he was thirteen. At ten years of age he went to school at
Sion House Academy, and thence to Eton, before he was turned twelve.
At both these schools, with little exception, he was solitary, not
having much in common with the other boys, and consequently he found
himself the butt for their tormenting ingenuity. He began a plan of
resistance to the fagging system, and never yielded; this seems to
have displeased the masters as much as the boys. At Eton he formed one
of his romantic attachments for a youth of his own age. He seems now,
as ever after, to have felt the yearning for perfect sympathy in some
human being; as one idol fell short of his self-formed ideal, he
sought for another. This was not the nature to be trained by bullying
and flogging, though sympathy and reason would never find him
irresponsive. His unresentful nature was shown in the way he helped
the boys who tormented him with their lessons; for though he appeared