Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/24

 14 NOTES AND QUERIES. ri2s.ix.juLY2.i92i. (12 S. vii. 190, 236, 375), who made use of the name " Eugenic " while in Italy. At the second reference will be found Vertue's account of McSwiny's projected work. In the British Museum, in a collec- tion of Tracts, &c. (816 m. 23 (134)), there is a copy of the prospectus issued by McSwiny and addressed " To the Ladies and Gentle- men of Taste in Great Britain and Ireland." McSwiny's publication does not contain any etchings by Canaletto (Antonio Canal). Canaletto is connected with it only because he assisted in painting the landscape and perspective in one of the pictures which is engraved therein. This plate is inscribed : " J. B. Pittoni et A. Canal et J. B. Cimaroli pinx. D. Beauvais sculp. D. M. Fratta delin." HILDA F. FINBEBG. 47, Holland Road, Kensington, W.14. MARY GODWIN (12 S. viii. 490). Percy Florence Shelley, Mary's surviving son by the poet, was at Harrow School from the third term of 1832 until the second term of 1836 ; that is, for nearly four years. He did not succeed his grandfather as third baronet until 1844. His mother went to live at Harrow in April, 1833, and she apparently stayed there until her son left the school on his way to Trinity, Cambridge. In the School Register, Percy Florence is entered as at the Grove the well-known boarding-house, then under the Rev. B. H. Kennedy, subsequently head master of Shrewsbury but on his mother's advent he appears to have become a home-boarder. As Mrs. Shelley refused to give up her son, and Sir Timothy only allowed her 300 a year in consequence, she had a hard struggle to keep the boy at the school. In spite of her love for her boy and her literary work, she felt lonely at " pretty Harrow." In a letter of July 17, 1834, to her friend Mrs. Gisborne she says : I am satisfied with my plan as regards him (Percy). . . . Still there are many drawbacks ; this is a dull, inhospitable place. I came counting on the kindness of a friend who lived here, but she died of the influenza, and I live in a silence and loneliness not possible anywhere except in England, where people are so islanded individually in habits ; I often languish for sympathy and pine for social festivity. Percy is much, but I think of you and Henry, ' and shrink from binding up my life in a child who may hereafter divide his fate from mine. But i I have no resources, everything earthly fails me i but him ; except on his account I live but to suffer. . . . I came here, as I said, in April 18 33, and 9th June was attacked by the influenza, so as to be con- fined to my bed ; nor did I recover the effects for several months. ... I am too poor to furnish. I have lodgings in the town disagree- able ones yet often, in spite of care and sorrow, I feel Wholly compensated by my boy. . . . God help me if anything was to happen to him ! should not survive it a week. Besides his society^ I have also a good deal of occupation. . . . And to the same, on Oct. 30, 1834, she writes : . . . He (Percy) is not all you say ; he has no ambition, and his talents are not so tran- scendent as you appear to imagine ; but he is a fine, spirited, clever boy, and I think, promises good things ; if hereafter I have reason to be proud of him, these melancholy days and weeks at Harrow will brighten in my imagination and they are not melancholy. . . At the same time I cannot in the least regret having come here : it was the only way I had of educating Percy at a public school, of which institution, at least here at Harrow, the more I see the more I like ; besides that, it was Shelley's wish that his son should be brought up at one. It is, indeed, peculiarly suited to Percy ; and whatever he may be, he will be twice as much as if he had been brought up in the narrow confinements of a private school. The boys here have liberty to the verge of licence ; yet of the latter, save the breaking of a few windows now and then, there is none. His life is not quite what it would be if he did not live with me, but the greater scope given to the cultivation of the affections is surely an ad- vantage. . . . And on June 11, 1835 : Percy is gone two miles off to bathe ; he can swim, and I am obliged to leave the rest to fate. It is no use coddling, yet it costs me many pangs ; but he is singularly trustworthy and careful. See ' D.N.B.' and ' Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,' by Mrs. Julian Marshall, 2 vols., 1889. A. R. BAYLEY. In his life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in the ' D.N.B.' Dr. Richard Garnett wrote : "In 1836 she was .... severely pressed by her exertions to give her son an edu- cation at Harrow, whither she had removed for the purpose." The son is, of course, the late Sir Percy Florence Shelley, who was born in Nov. 1819. EDWARD BENSLY. Shelley's son, Sir Percy Florence, was sent to Harrow School, Michaelmas, 1832, and Mary went to live there in the following April in order to be near her son. She did not like Harrow and was taken ill there, afterwards fretting for the society of her friends in London. Apparently she lived there until Easter, 1836, when Percy left the school. W. A. HUTCHISOX.