way.  Wild a fiction as his life was in many respects, it was a fiction he himself sincerely and innocently believed.  His imaginative appetite, having devoured science by day and sixpenny romances by night, still remained unsatisfied, and, quite probably, went on to mix up reality and make-believe past all recognition for its next dish.  Francis Thompson, with all respect to many critics, was right when he noted what a complete playfellow Shelley was in his life.  When he was in London after his expulsion from the University, he could throw himself with all his being into childish games like skimming stones on the Serpentine, “counting with the utmost glee the number of bounds, as the flat stones flew skimming over the surface of the water.”  He found a perfect pleasure in paper boats, and we hear of his making a sail on one occasion out of a ten-pound note—­one of those myths, perhaps, which gather round poets.  It must have been the innocence of pleasure shown in games like these that made him an irresistible companion to so many comparatively prosaic people.  For the idea that Shelley in private life was aloof and unpopular from his childhood up is an entirely false one.  As Medwin points out, in referring to his school-days, he “must have had a rather large circle of friends, since his parting breakfast at Eton cost L50.”

Even at the distance of a century, we are still seized by the fascination of that boyish figure with the “stag eyes,” so enthusiastically in pursuit of truth and of dreams, of trifles light as air and of the redemption of the human race.  “His figure,” Hogg tells us, “was slight and fragile, and yet his bones were large and strong.  He was tall, but he stooped so much that he seemed of low stature.”  And, in Medwin’s book, we even become reconciled to that shrill voice of his, which Lamb and most other people found so unpleasant.  Medwin gives us nothing in the nature of a portrait of Shelley in these heavy and incoherent pages; but he gives us invaluable materials for such a portrait—­in descriptions, for instance, of how he used to go on with his reading, even when he was out walking, and would get so absorbed in his studies that he sometimes asked, “Mary, have I dined?” More important, as revealing his too exquisite sensitiveness, is the account of how Medwin saw him, “after threading the carnival crowd in the Lung’ Arno Corsos, throw himself, half-fainting, into a chair, overpowered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in that sensual and unintellectual crowd.”  Some people, on reading a passage like this, will rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig.  But the prig is a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and imperfections of humanity.  Shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of his own rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in English history.  He did not indulge in repentance, like Burns and Byron.  On the other hand, he was not in the smallest degree