Often did he astonish the boys by his experiments, and once he accidentally set fire to some trees on the common. At that time he lodged at the house of his tutor, who, on a certain day, found Shelley in his room amusing himself by the production of a blue flame. Chemical experiments were prohibited in the boys' chambers; and the tutor (Mr. Bethel) somewhat angrily asked what the lad was doing. Shelley jocularly replied that he was raising the devil. Mr. Bethel seized hold of a mysterious implement on the table, and in an instant was thrown against the wall, having grasped a highlycharged electrical machine. Of course, the young experimentalist paid dearly for this unfortunate occurrence.

"Among my latest recollections of Shelley's life at Eton," concludes Mr. Packe, "is the publication of Zastrozzi,* for which I think he received 40%. With part of the proceeds he gave a most magnificent banquet to eight of his friends, among whom I was included. I cannot now call to mind the names of the other guests, excepting those of two or three who are not now living. Shelley was too peculiar in his genius and his habits to be 'the hare with many friends;' but the few who knew him loved him, and, if I may judge from myself, remember with affectionate regret that his schooldays were more adventurous than happy.”

His opposition to fagging was not without some good effect for the time. He formed a conspiracy against the system, and succeeded in checking it—at any rate,

* A novel so called.

as far as regarded himself. But the fiery conflicts through which he had to pass impressed him with a sense of wretchedness which he afterwards described with passionate sweetness in the dedication of the Revolt of Islam:

"Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear friend, when first
The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass.
I do remember well the hour which burst
My spirit's sleep: a fresh May dawn it was,
When I walk'd forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I knew not why; until there rose
From the near school-room voices that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes -
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

"And then clasp'd my hands, and look'd around;
But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which pour'd their warm drops on the sunny ground:
So, without shame, I spake:-'I will be wise,

And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power; for I grow weary to behold

The selfish and the strong still tyrannize

Without reproach or check.' I then controll'd

My tears; my heart grew calm; and I was meek and bold.

"And from that hour did I, with earnest thought, Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore; Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught

I cared to learn; but from that secret store

Wrought linked armor for my soul, before

It might walk forth, to war among mankind.

Thus, power and hope were strengthen'd more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind

A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined."

The agony which Shelley thus endured, for the very

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. He was a physician, and also one of the tutors.

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