The malediction of the old man seems to have clung to Shelley’s mind to the end, and made him rebellious against everything bearing the paternal name.  He assailed the Father of the Hebrew theocracy with amazing bitterness, and joined Prometheus in cursing and dethroning Zeus, the Olympian usurper.  With him, tyrant and father were synonymous, and he has drawn the old Cenci, in the play of that name, with the same fierce, unfilial pencil, dipped in blood and wormwood.  Shelley was by nature, self-instruction, and inexperience of life, impatient and full of impulse; and the sharp and violent measures by which they attempted to reclaim him only exasperated him the more against everything respected by his opponents and persecutors.  Genius is by nature aggressive or retaliatory; and the young poet, writhing and laughing hysterically, like Demogorgon, returned the scorn of society with a scorn, the deeper and loftier in the end, that it grew calm and became the abiding principle of a philosophic life.  It was the act of his father which drove Shelley into such open rebellion against gods and men.  Very probably, though he might have lived an infidel in religious matters, like tens of thousands of his fellows, he would not have written, or, at least, published, such shocking things, if his father had been more patient with a youth so organized.  But parents have a right to show a terrible anger when thwarted by their children, and in this case the father too much resembled the son in wilful impetuosity of temper.  Turned out of his first home, Shelley went wandering forth by land and sea,—­a reed shaken by the wind, a restless outcast yearning for repose and human sympathy, and in this way encountering the questionable accidents of his troubled, unguarded life, and gathering all the feverish inspiration of his melancholy and unfamiliar poetry.

With a sense of physical infirmity or defect which shaped the sequestered philosophy of the Cowpers, the Berangers, and others, the manlier minds of literature, including Byron himself, in some measure, Shelley felt he was not fit for the shock and hum of men and the greater or lesser legerdemain of life, and so turned shyly away to live and follow his plans and reveries apart, after the law of his being, violating in this way what may be called the common law of society, and meeting the fate of all nonconformists.  He was slighted and ridiculed, and even suspected; for people in general, when they see a man go aside from the highway, maundering and talking to himself, think there must be a reason for it; they suppose him insane, or scornful, or meditating a murder,—­in any case, one to be visited with hard thoughts; and thus baffled curiosity will grow uneasily into disgust, and into calumny, if not into some species of outrage,—­and very naturally, after all; for man is, on the whole, made for society, and society has a sovereign right to take cognizance of him, his ways and his movements, as a matter of necessary surveillance.