pen:  one an “Address to Lord Ellenborough” in defence of a man punished for having published Paine’s “Age of Reason,” and another an “Essay on Christianity.”  In the first, with all a boy’s enthusiasm, he opposes the high abstract logic of truth and toleration to the hard government policy which tries to keep a reckless kind of semi-civilization in order, and cannot bring itself to believe, that, as yet, the broad principle of license is the one that can serve the cosmogony best.  In the next he rather surprises the reader by exhibiting himself as the eulogist and expounder of Jesus Christ,—­but not after the manner of Saint Paul.  No doubt, the secular and semi-pagan tone of this dissertation will jar against the orthodoxy of a great many readers,—­to whom, however, it will be interesting as a literary curiosity.  But it is meant to show the character of Shelley in a more amiable light than that in which it is contemplated by the generality of people.

To explain Percy Bysshe Shelley, by telling us he was inconsequent, absurd, and odd in his manners, is as futile as to explain him by saying he was a strange, wonderful genius, of the Platonic or Pythagorean order, always soaring above the atmosphere of common men.  To call a man of genius an inspired idiot or an inspired oddity is an easy, but false way of interpreting him.  The truth of Shelley’s character may be found by a more matter-of-fact investigation.  He was naturally of a feeble constitution from childhood, and not addicted to the amusements of stronger boys; hence he became shy, and, when bullied or flouted by the others, sensitive and irritable, and given to secret reading and study, instead of play with those “little fiends that scoffed incessantly.”  These habits gave him the name of an oddity, and what is called a “Miss Molly,” and the persecution that followed only made him more recluse and speculative, and disgusted with the ways and feelings of others.  He began to have thoughts beyond his years, and was happy to think he had, in these, a compensation for what he suffered from his schoolfellows.  With his hermit habits grew naturally a strong egotistical vanity, which he could as little repress as the other youths could repress their muscular propensities to exercise; and hence his eagerness to set forth the threadbare heretical theories he had found among his books.  For supporting these with an insolent show of importunity, he was turned away from college, and soon left his father’s home, with his father’s curse to bear him company.  Had the baronet been in the way of a lettre de cachet, like Mirabeau’s father, he would certainly have had Percy put into Newgate and kept there.