Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/41

 Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and other Italian men of letters for Lardner's ‘Cabinet Cyclopædia,’ and severely pressed by her exertions to give her son an education at Harrow, whither she had removed for the purpose. Sir Timothy did not see his way to assist, but, through his attorney, ‘trusted and hoped you may find it practicable to give him a good education out of the 300l. a year.’ The thing was done; Percy Florence proceeded from Harrow to Cambridge, but the struggle ruined Mary Shelley's health, and left her, exhausted by effort and ‘torn to pieces by memory,’ very unfit to discharge the task which devolved upon her of editing Shelley's works when the obstacles to publication were removed in 1838. The poems nevertheless appeared in four volumes in 1839, with notes, slight in comparison with what they might have been, but still invaluable. The prose remains were published in the following year, and, notwithstanding the number of pirated editions, both publications proved profitable. A further piece of good fortune signalised 1840, when Sir Timothy relented to the extent of settling 400l. a year upon his grandson on occasion of his attaining his majority and taking his degree. Mrs. Shelley was now able to seek rest and change on the continent, and eagerly availed herself of the opportunity. In 1840 and 1841 she and her son travelled in Germany, and in 1842 and 1843 in Italy. Her impressions were recorded in ‘Rambles in Germany and Italy,’ published in two volumes in 1844 and dedicated to Samuel Rogers, who, like Moore, had always shown himself a sympathising friend. The German part of the book contains little of especial interest, but the Italian part is full of admirable remarks on Italian art and manners.

In 1844 Sir Timothy Shelley's death placed Mary in a position of comparative affluence. The first act of her and her son was to carry out Shelley's intentions by settling an annuity of 120l. upon Leigh Hunt. She next endeavoured to write Shelley's life; but her health and spirits were unequal to so trying a task, and nothing was written but a fragment printed at the beginning of Hogg's biography. She died in Chester Square, London, on 1 Feb. 1851, and was interred in the churchyard at Bournemouth near the residence of her son, in the tomb where he also is buried, and to which the remains of her father and mother were subsequently brought.

Personally, Mary Shelley was remarkable for her high forehead, piercing eyes, and pale complexion. She gained in beauty as she grew in years; and her bust strikingly brings out the resemblance, which Thornton Hunt noticed, to the bust of Clytie. A fine portrait by Rothwell, painted in 1841, is engraved as the frontispiece to Mrs. Marshall's biography.



SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE (1792–1822), poet, was born at Field Place, Warnham, near Horsham, on 4 Aug. 1792, and was the eldest son of Timothy, afterwards Sir Timothy Shelley, bart., and of his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Charles Pilfold. The family, an offshoot of the Shelleys of Michelgrove, had been transplanted for a time to America, in the person of Percy's great-grandfather Timothy, whose son Bysshe, returning at an early age, made the fortune of his house by two successive runaway matches, the first with Mary Catherine, daughter of the Rev. Theobald Michell of Horsham. Percy's father (b. 1753) was the offspring of this marriage. Bysshe Shelley, who is described as handsome, enterprising, and not over-scrupulous, dignified in appearance and manners, but addicted to inferior company, survived his grandson's birth by twenty-two years. He was a warm supporter of the Duke of Norfolk's interest in the county, and, upon the brief return of the whigs to office in 1806, was rewarded with a baronetcy, ‘the whim,’ according to a local rhymer, ‘of his son Tim.’ Timothy Shelley's character is fairly given by Professor Dowden: ‘He had a better heart than his father, and not so clear a head. A kindly, pompous, capricious, well-meaning, ill-doing, wrong-headed man.’ His letters evince singular confusion, both of thought and expression. The accounts of Shelley's mother are somewhat contradictory, except as regards the beauty which all her children derived from her, and the facility of composition which became the special inheritance of Percy. It is important to remark that the family was not, as sometimes assumed, tory, but pronouncedly whig, and that Shelley would grow up with an addiction to liberty in the abstract and with no special aversion to the revolution.

Shelley received his first instruction from the Rev. Thomas Edwards of Horsham. At ten he was transferred to Sion House academy, Brentford, kept by the Rev. Dr. Greenlaw, a bad middle-class school, which nevertheless profoundly influenced him in two ways. The persecutions which the shy,