Youthful feelings are not deep, but the impression of this scene long left a sting behind it ; perhaps Shelley, in brooding over the prediction as to his incapacity for writing Latin verses, then resolved to falsify it, for he afterwards, as will appear by two specimens which I give in their proper place, became a great proficient in the art.

He passed among his schoolfellows as a strange and unsocial being, for when a holiday relieved us from our tasks, and the other boys were engaged in such sports as the narrow limits of our prisoncourt allowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace backwards and forwards-I think I see him now-along the southern wall, indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the chaotic elements, if I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful a world. I very early learned to penetrate into this soul sublime-why may I not say divine, for what is there that comes nearer to God than genius in the heart of a child? I, too, was the only one at the school with whom he could communicate

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his sufferings, or exchange ideas: I was, indeed, some years his senior, and he was grateful to me for so often singling him out for a companion; for it is well known that it is considered in some degree a condescension for boys to make intimates of those in a lower form than themselves. Then we used to walk together up and down his favourite spot, and there he would outpour his sorrows to me, with observations far beyond his years, and which, according to his after ideas, seemed to have sprung from an antenatal life. I have often thought that he had these walks of ours in mind, when, in describing an antique group, he says, "Look, the figures are walking with a sauntering and idle pace, and talking to each other as they walk, as you may have seen a younger and an elder boy at school, walking in some grassy spot of the play-ground, with that tender friendship for each other which the age inspires." If Shelley abominated one task more than another it was a dancing lesson. At a Ball at Willis's rooms, where, among other pupils of Sala, I made one, an aunt of mine, to whom the

Letter No. 1, in the Appendix, was addressed, asked the dancing master why Bysshe was not present, to which he replied in his broken English, "Mon Dieu, madam, what should he do here? Master Shelley will not learn any ting-he is so gauche." In fact, he contrived to abscond as often as possible from the dancing lessons, and when forced to attend, suffered inexpressibly.

Half-year after half-year passed away, and in spite of his seeming neglect of his tasks, he soon surpassed all his competitors, for his memory was so tenacious that he never forgot a word once turned up in his dictionary. He was very fond of reading, and greedily devoured all the books which were brought to school after the holidays; these were mostly blue books. Who does not know what blue books mean? but if there should be any one ignorant enough not to know what those dear darling volumes, so designated from their covers, contain, be it known, that they are or were to be bought for sixpence, and embodied stories of haunted castles, bandits, murderers, and other grim personages-a most exciting and

interesting sort of food for boys' minds; among those of a larger calibre was one which I have never seen since, but which I still remember with a recouchè delight. It was "Peter Wilkins." How much Shelley wished for a winged wife and little winged cherubs of children!

But this stock was very soon exhausted. As there was no school library, we soon resorted, "under the rose," to a low circulating one in the town (Brentford), and here the treasures at first seemed inexhaustible. Novels at this time, (I speak of 1803) in three goodly volumes, such as we owe to the great Wizard of the North, were unknown. Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, formed the staple of the collection. But these authors were little to Shelley's taste. Anne Ratcliffe's works pleased him most, particularly the Italian, but the RosaMatilda school, especially a strange, wild romance, entitled " Zofloya, or the Moor," a Monk-Lewisy production, where his Satanic Majesty, as in Faust, plays the chief part, enraptured him. The two novels he afterwards

wrote, entitled "Zastrozzi” and the "Rosicrucian," were modelled after this ghastly production, all of which I now remember, is, that the principal character is an incarnatian of the devil, but who, unlike the Monk, (then a prohibited book, but afterwards an especial favourite with Shelley) instead of tempting a man and turning him into a likeness of himself, enters into a woman called Olympia, who poisons her husband homoeopathically, and ends by being carried off very melodramatically in blue flames to the place of dolor.

"Accursed," said Schiller," the folly of our nurses, who distort the imagination with frightful ghost stories, and impress ghastly pictures of executions on our weak brains, so that involuntary shudderings seize the limbs of a man, making them rattle in frosty agony," &c. "But who knows," he adds, "if these traces of early education be ineffaceable in us?" Schiller was, however, himself much addicted to this sort of reading. It is said of Collins that he employed his mind chiefly upon works of fiction