Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/403

 SHELLEY

SHOTWELL

SHELLEY, Mary Wollstonecraft,

writer. B. Aug. 30, 1797. She was the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstone craft, and, as her mother had died in childbirth, she was educated by her father, and absorbed his liberal and Eationalist sentiments. In 1814 she met Shelley, who fell in love with the beautiful girl. He married her in 1816, and assisted her to educate herself. She mastered Latin, Italian, and French, and learned some Greek. Though more intellectual than the poet, she lived happily with him until his death, and wrote two romances (Franken stein, 1818, and Valperga, 1820). At Shelley s death she returned to England, and continued to write stories. She edited Shelley s poems in four volumes in 1839. D. Feb. 1, 1851.

SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe, poet. B. Aug. 4, 1792. Ed. Sion House Academy (Brentford), Eton, and Oxford (University College). A very handsome and sensitive boy, Shelley was from the first so bold and independent that even at Eton he was known as &quot; Shelley the Atheist,&quot; and wrote A Poetical View of the Existing State of Things. He was already a Republican. From Oxford he was expelled, in 1811, for writing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. He joined the reformers in London, took an active part in the move ment for justice to Ireland, and wrote a powerful remonstrance when D. I. Eaton was condemned for selling Paine s Age of Eeason (1812). His first notable poem, Queen Mab, was published in 1813, though it attracted little notice. The notes to the poem are very Rationalistic. In the following year he left his very uncongenial wife, and went to Switzerland with Mary Godwin. They returned to England in 1815, and, as his wife committed suicide (to escape the consequences of her own misconduct) in 1816, he married Mary. The Court of Chancery refused him the charge of the two children of his first marriage, and when a child was born to him and Mary he went to live in Italy, 733

lest it should be taken from him. Alastor had been published in 1816, and The Revolt of Islam in 1818 ; but it was in Italy that Shelley produced his great works. Prome theus Unbound was written in Rome in 1819, and published in 1820; Epipsychidion was published in 1821, and Adonais in the same year. Shelley had been for some time devoted to Plato, and the &quot; Atheistic Materialism &quot; which he had in earlier years borrowed from the French Encyclopaedists (especially from D Holbach s Systeme de la nature) had yielded place to a spiritual philosophy and mild form of Theism. Adonais expresses his later views. Dowden traces his development in his authoritative Life. In the last years of his life Shelley used strong language about the Encyclo paedists, and believed in &quot;a universal mind.&quot; He rejected Christianity as disdainfully as ever, but occasionally referred to &quot; God &quot; (ii, 508). He never clearly believed in immortality. &quot; I hope, but my hopes are not unmixed with fear,&quot; he said (ii, 511) ; and a few months before his death he spoke of prussic acid as &quot; the golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest &quot; (ii, 507). His glorious and audacious poetry lights up the gloom of the sombre period of reaction that followed Waterloo, and it may be many generations yet before the full wisdom of his Rationalist creed of life is recognized. He was drowned, in his thirtieth year, off the Italian coast on July 8, 1822.

SHOTWELL, Professor James Thomson, B.A., Ph.D., American historian. B. (Canada) Aug. 6, 1874. Ed. Toronto University. From 1900 to 1902 he was lecturer on history, from 1902 to 1905 instructor, from 1904 to 1907 adjoint pro fessor, and from 1907 onward professor of history at Columbia University. He was assistant general editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1904-1905, and he edited the Columbia University publication, Records of Civilization (3 vols., 1915-16). Professor Shotwell s Rationalism is finely expressed in his Religious Revolution of To-day (1913, of the &quot; William Brewster Clark Memorial 734