These extracts prove beyond all question that the first contact with the outer world called into activity two of Shelley’s strongest moral qualities—­his hatred of tyranny and brutal force in any form, and his profound sentiment of friendship.  The admiring love of women, which marked him no less strongly, and which made him second only to Shakespere in the sympathetic delineation of a noble feminine ideal, had been already developed by his deep affection for his mother and sisters.  It is said that he could not receive a letter from them without manifest joy.

“Shelley,” says Medwin, “was at this time tall for his age, slightly and delicately built, and rather narrow-chested, with a complexion fair and ruddy, a face rather long than oval.  His features, not regularly handsome, were set off by a profusion of silky brown hair, that curled naturally.  The expression of his countenance was one of exceeding sweetness and innocence.  His blue eyes were very large and prominent.  They were at times, when he was abstracted, as he often was in contemplation, dull, and as it were, insensible to external objects; at others they flashed with the fire of intelligence.  His voice was soft and low, but broken in its tones,—­when anything much interested him, harsh and immodulated; and this peculiarity he never lost.  He was naturally calm, but when he heard of or read of some flagrant act of injustice, oppression, or cruelty, then indeed the sharpest marks of horror and indignation were visible in his countenance.”

Such as the child was, we shall find the man to have remained unaltered through the short space of life allowed him.  Loving, innocent, sensitive, secluded from the vulgar concerns of his companions, strongly moralized after a peculiar and inborn type of excellence, drawing his inspirations from Nature and from his own soul in solitude, Shelley passed across the stage of this world, attended by a splendid vision which sustained him at a perilous height above the kindly race of men.  The penalty of this isolation he suffered in many painful episodes.  The reward he reaped in a measure of more authentic prophecy, and in a nobler realization of his best self, than could be claimed by any of his immediate contemporaries.

CHAPTER 2.

Eton and Oxford.

In 1805 Shelley went from Sion House to Eton.  At this time Dr. Keate was headmaster and Shelley’s tutor was a Mr. Bethel, “one of the dullest men in the establishment.”  At Eton Shelley was not popular either with his teachers or his elder school-fellows, although the boys of his own age are said to have adored him.  “He was all passion,” writes Mrs. Shelley; “passionate in his resistance to an injury, passionate in his love:”  and this vehemence of temperament he displayed by organizing a rebellion against fagging, which no doubt won for him the applause of his juniors and equals.  It