Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/42

 sensitive boy underwent from his schoolfellows inspired him with the horror of oppression and indomitable spirit of resistance which actuated his whole life; and the scientific instruction he received, though little more than a pretence in itself, awoke a passionate desire to penetrate the secrets of nature. It may almost be said that science was to Shelley what abstract thought was to Coleridge, and that the main peculiarity of the genius of each resulted from the thirst for discovery becoming engrafted upon a temperament originally most unscientifically prone to the romantic and marvellous. Eton, whither Shelley went at the age of twelve, repeated the experience of Sion House on a larger scale. Here, again, his torment was the persecution of his schoolfellows, and his consolation scientific research conducted agreeably to his own notions. He destroyed an old willow with a burning-glass, and, endeavouring to raise the devil, succeeded so far as to raise a tutor. Many other tales of his residence at Eton are probably legendary, but there is no doubt of the influence exerted upon him by the benevolent physician James Lind (1736–1817) [q. v.], whom he has celebrated as the hermit in ‘The Revolt of Islam.’ He was nicknamed ‘Mad Shelley,’ or ‘Shelley the Atheist,’ and he was known among his schoolfellows for a habit of ‘cursing his father and the king.’ He was no inapt scholar, and his progress in the classics eventually made him acquainted with Pliny's ‘Natural History,’ the first two books of which strongly influenced his theological opinions. His literary instincts also awoke; and while at Eton (at sixteen) he wrote and published his romance of ‘Zastrozzi,’ a boy's crude imitation of Mrs. Radcliffe. Somewhat later he composed another romance in the same manner, ‘St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian,’ which was also published (in 1810); joined his cousin, Thomas Medwin [q. v.], in writing a poem on the ‘Wandering Jew,’ which found no publisher at the time, but eventually appeared in ‘Fraser's Magazine;’ and in conjunction either with his sister Elizabeth or with his cousin, Harriet Grove—to whom he was, or thought himself, attached—published in 1810 ‘Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire,’ which he withdrew on discovering that his coadjutor had cribbed wholesale from Matthew Gregory Lewis. A hundred copies are said to have been put into circulation, but not one has ever come to light. Another early poem, ‘A Poetical View of the Existing State of Things,’ published anonymously while he was at Oxford, has also disappeared.

Shelley matriculated at University College, Oxford, on 10 April 1810, and commenced residence at the Michaelmas term following. Oxford might have been a happy residence for him had he not brought along with him not only the passion for research into whatever the university did not desire him to learn, and the pantheism, miscalled by himself and others atheism, which he had imbibed from Pliny, but also a spirit of aggressive propaganda. Of this he afterwards cured himself, but at the time it was certain to involve him in collision with authorities whom he had indeed no great reason to respect, but of whose real responsibility for his behaviour he took no proper account. This trait was no doubt encouraged by the intimacy he contracted with Thomas Jefferson Hogg [q. v.], a man of highly original character entirely dissimilar to his own, whose sketch of him during the Oxford period is the most vivid, and probably the most accurate, portrait of the youthful Shelley (cf., Letters, i. 37, 444). Hogg's sarcastic humour encouraged, if it did not prompt, Shelley to such dangerous freaks as composing and circulating, in conjunction with his friend, a pamphlet of burlesque verses gravely attributed to Margaret Nicholson [q. v.], a mad woman who had attempted to kill the king (Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, Oxford, 1810); and afterwards submitting a printed syllabus of arguments, supposed to demonstrate ‘The Necessity of Atheism,’ to the bishops and heads of colleges. The authorities summoned Shelley before them on the morning of 25 March 1811, and, upon his refusal to answer interrogatories, delivered to him a sentence of expulsion, which had been signed and sealed in anticipation. Hogg's generous protest brought a similar sentence upon himself.

Shelley's expulsion was rather favourable than otherwise to the development of his genius, but involved him in the greatest misfortune of his life, his imprudent marriage. Excluded from home, he took rooms in London at 15 Poland Street, and frequented the hospitals, with the idea of ultimately becoming a physician. While in town he renewed the slight acquaintance he had already formed with Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of an hotel-keeper retired from business, and a fellow pupil of Shelley's sisters at a school in Clapham. A schoolgirl verging on sixteen, she thought herself persecuted; Shelley sympathised, and interfered sufficiently to give her some apparent claim upon him; and when in July he retired to his cousin's country house at Cwm