At church on Sunday to attend
    Will serve to keep the world your friend.

His morality in like manner was purely conventional, as may be gathered from his telling his eldest son that he would never pardon a mesalliance, but would provide for as many illegitimate children as he chose to have.  For the rest, he appears to have been a fairly good landlord, and a not unkind father, sociable and hospitable, somewhat vain and occasionally odd in manner, but qualified for passing muster with the country gentlemen around him.  In the capacity to understand a nature which deviated from the ordinary type so remarkably as Shelley’s, he was utterly deficient; and perhaps we ought to regard it as his misfortune that fate made him the father of a man who was among the greatest portents of originality and unconventionality that this century has seen.  Toward an ordinary English youth, ready to sow his wild oats at college, and willing to settle at the proper age and take his place upon the bench of magistrates, Sir Timothy Shelley would have shown himself an indulgent father; and it must be conceded by the poet’s biographer that if Percy Bysshe had but displayed tact and consideration on his side, many of the misfortunes which signalized his relations to his father would have been avoided.

Shelley passed his childhood at Field Place, and when he was about six years old began to be taught, together with his sisters, by Mr. Edwards, a clergyman who lived at Warnham.  What is recorded of these early years we owe to the invaluable communications of his sister Hellen.  The difference of age between her and her brother Bysshe obliges us to refer her recollections to a somewhat later period—­probably to the holidays he spent away from Sion House and Eton.  Still, since they introduce us to the domestic life of his then loved home, it may be proper to make quotations from them in this place.  Miss Shelley tells us her brother “would frequently come to the nursery, and was full of a peculiar kind of pranks.  One piece of mischief, for which he was rebuked, was running a stick through the ceiling of a low passage to find some new chamber, which could be made effective for some flights of his vivid imagination.”  He was very much attached to his sisters, and used to entertain them with stories, in which “an alchemist, old and grey, with a long beard,” who was supposed to abide mysteriously in the garret of Field Place, played a prominent part.  “Another favourite theme was the ‘Great Tortoise,’ that lived in Warnham Pond; and any unwonted noise was accounted for by the presence of this great beast, which was made into the fanciful proportions most adapted to excite awe and wonder.”  To his friend Hogg, in after-years, Shelley often spoke about another reptile, no mere creature of myth or fable, the “Old Snake,” who had inhabited the gardens of Field Place for several generations.  This venerable serpent was accidentally killed by the gardener’s scythe; but he lived long in