reason that he was more outspoken and truth-loving than other boys, is only one out of many painful examples of the frequent unfitness of schoolmasters and tutors for the duty which they seek to execute. However, we have improved since the early part of the present century; for those were the days when coercion was looked on as the only principle of school government, and when kindness was regarded as sentimentalism. With one exception, Shelley found his tutors men of rough, passionate, and hard natures, who claimed obedience merely because they possessed authority, without showing that they had any right to exercise their power by reason of superior discretion and serener wisdom; men who answered inquiries by cuffs, who sought to tame independence by violence, who exasperated the eccentricities of a wild but generous nature by the opposition of their own coarser minds, and who made religion distasteful by confounding it with dogmatism, and learning repulsive by allying it with pedantic formality. Had these instructors possessed half as much knowledge of human nature as of Greek roots and Latin "quantities," they might have developed and guided the mind of Shelley; but they thought not of this, and therefore only irritated a sensitive and ardent disposition.

The one exception to this narrow and unfortunate rule was Dr. Lind, an erudite scholar and amiable old man, much devoted to chemistry, at whose house Shelley passed the happiest of his Eton hours. physician, and also one of the tutors.

He was a Mrs. Shelley

relates that the Doctor often stood by to befriend and support the persecuted boy, and that her husband never, in after life, mentioned his name without love and veneration. The poet has introduced him into the Revolt of Islam, as the old hermit who liberates Laon from prison, and attends on him in sickness; and into Prince Athanase, as the wise and benignant Zonoras. In the former poem, (Canto IV.), he speaks of the hermit's heart having grown old without being corrupted, and adds:

"That hoary man had spent his livelong age

In converse with the dead, who leave the stamp
Of ever-burning thoughts on many a page
When they are gone into the senseless damp
Of graves. His spirit thus became a lamp
Of splendor, like to those on which it fed.
Through peopled haunts, the city and the camp,
Deep thirst for knowledge had his footsteps led,
And all the ways of men among mankind he read.

"But custom maketh blind and obdurate

The loftiest hearts. He had beheld the woe

In which mankind was bound, but deem'd that fate,
Which made them abject, would preserve them so."

For his strange pupil, whose scientific studies he directed, and whose pleasures he was eager to promote, Dr. Lind entertained a warm affection. When Shelley was seized with a dangerous fever, he hurried at a moment's notice to Field Place, and by his skill, and the soothing influence of his presence, saved his young friend from pressing danger. The incident in the Revolt

of Islam is, therefore, a fact. The Doctor's kindness made on Shelley a deep and lasting impression; the more so as, from the indiscreet gossip of a servant, who had overheard some conversation between his father and the village doctor, Bysshe had come to the conviction that it was intended to remove him from the house to some distant asylum.

Shelley also felt an affectionate regard for his relations, particularly for his mother and sisters; and I have heard his eldest surviving sister relate that, during a supposed dangerous attack of gout under which his father was suffering, Bysshe would creep noiselessly to his room door, to watch and listen with tender anxiety.

The chemical experiments which the young student eagerly pursued at Eton were not discontinued when he was at home. His little sisters' frocks were often found stained with caustic; and Miss Shelley states in one of her letters: "I confess my pleasure was entirely negatived by terror at the effects. Whenever he came to me with his piece of brown paper under his arm, and a bit of wire and a bottle (if I remember right), my heart would beat with fear at his approach; but shame kept me silent, and, with as many others as we could collect, we were placed hand in hand round the nursery table to be electrified; but when a suggestion was made that chilblains were to be cured by this means, my terror overwhelmed all other feelings, and the expression of it released me from all future annoyance. His own hands and clothes were constantly stained and corroded with acids, and it only seemed too probable that some day the

house would be burnt down, or some serious mischief happen to himself or others from the explosion of combustibles. He used afterwards to speak himself with horror of having once swallowed by accident some arsenic at Eton, and feared he should never entirely recover from the shock it had inflicted on his constitution."

The boy Shelley now passes from our sight, and in the next chapter we shall have to speak of the poet in the first dawn of manhood.

CHAPTER II.

SHELLEY'S FIRST LOVE: OXFORD: EXPULSION.

IN 1809, Shelley left Eton and returned home; and, being now of an age when it is not uncommon for people to have some touch of romance in them a tendency which in him was developed to an unusual degree — his delight was to steal from the house, and to wander about by moonlight. His sister remarks that "the prosaic minds of ordinary mortals could not understand the pleasure to be derived from contemplating the stars, when he, probably, was repeating to himself lines which were soon to astonish those who looked upon him as a boy. The old servant of the family would follow him, and say that 'Master Bysshe only took a walk, and came back again." But (as in Mrs. Barbauld's excellent story of Eyes and no Eyes) the walk of one individual along a given road may be as different from that of another along the same path as a plenum is different from a vacuum. While the old servant, probably, saw little but the dust, and the monotonous hedges, and the figure of his young master walking on before, the undeveloped poet saw the infinite beauty of Nature spreading out in all its vastness and its minuteness, and was busied