With her wealth he became an important personage, and consorted with gentlemen and statesmen of influence, attaching himself particularly to the Duke of Northumberland, by whose influence he was made a baronet.  When his rich wife died, Shelley married a still richer bride; and so this man, who started out as a mere adventurer without a shilling to his name, died in 1813, leaving more than a million dollars in cash, with lands whose rent-roll yielded a hundred thousand dollars every year.

If any touch of the romantic which we find in Shelley is a matter of heredity, we must trace it to this able, daring, restless, and magnificent old grandfather, who was the beau ideal of an English squire—­the sort of squire who had added foreign graces to native sturdiness.  But young Shelley, the future poet, seemed scarcely to be English at all.  As a young boy he cared nothing for athletic sports.  He was given to much reading.  He thought a good deal about abstractions with which most schoolboys never concern themselves at all.

Consequently, both in private schools and afterward at Eton, he became a sort of rebel against authority.  He resisted the fagging-system.  He spoke contemptuously of physical prowess.  He disliked anything that he was obliged to do, and he rushed eagerly into whatever was forbidden.

Finally, when he was sent to University College, Oxford, he broke all bounds.  At a time when Tory England was aghast over the French Revolution and its results, Shelley talked of liberty and equality on all occasions.  He made friends with an uncouth but able fellow student, who bore the remarkable name of Thomas Jefferson Hogg—­a name that seems rampant with republicanism—­and very soon he got himself expelled from the university for publishing a little tract of an infidel character called “A Defense of Atheism.”

His expulsion for such a cause naturally shocked his father.  It probably disturbed Shelley himself; but, after all, it gave him some satisfaction to be a martyr for the cause of free speech.  He went to London with his friend Hogg, and took lodgings there.  He read omnivorously—­Hogg says as much as sixteen hours a day.  He would walk through the most crowded streets poring over a volume, while holding another under one arm.

His mind was full of fancies.  He had begun what was afterward called “his passion for reforming everything.”  He despised most of the laws of England.  He thought its Parliament ridiculous.  He hated its religion.  He was particularly opposed to marriage.  This last fact gives some point to the circumstances which almost immediately confronted him.