Shelley is still regarded by the majority, either as a victim of persecution, or a rebel against authority, or both,—­his friends probably inclining to hold him up as a philosopher-patriot, whose resistance to intellectual oppression placed him in the condition of a martyr and robbed him of his fair share of life.  My own earliest memory presents him very much in that aspect.  I first recall him pale and slender, worn with anxiety, openly alluding to the marks of premature age in his own aspect, bursting with aspirations against tyranny of all kinds, and yielding to fits of dreadful despondency under sufferings inflicted by the dignitaries of the land at the instance of his own family.  The circumstances by which he was surrounded contributed to this guise of martyrdom.

My own earliest recollections began in prison, where my father[A] was incarcerated for critical remarks which at the present day would scarcely attract attention, and which were put forth in no impulse of personal hostility, but under the strongest sense of duty, with the desire to vindicate the constitutional freedom of England against the perverted control of faction and the influences of a corrupt court.  At that time my father was accounted a man prone to mutiny against “the powers that be,” although his political opinions belonged to a class which would now be regarded as too moderate for popular liberalism.  He has been censured for literary affectation and for personal improvidence, but only by those who do not understand the real elements of his character.  The leading ideas of his mind were, first, earnest duty to his country at any cost to himself; next, the sacrifice of any ordinary consideration to personal affection and friendship; and lastly, the cultivation of “the ideal,” especially as it is developed in imaginative literature.  His life was passed in an absolute devotion to these three principles.  A one-sided frankness has blazoned to the world the sacrifices which he accepted from friends, but has whispered nothing of the more than commensurate sacrifices made on his side; and the simplicity that rendered him the creature of the library in which he lived entered into the expression of all his thoughts and feelings.

[Footnote A:  Leigh Hunt.]

Although I can remember some of the most eminent men who visited us in prison, Shelley I cannot; but I can well recall my father’s description of the young stranger who came to him breathing the classic thoughts of college, ardent with aspirations for the emancipation of man from intellectual slavery, and endowed by Nature with an aspect truly “angelic.”