475 



SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE. 



SHELLEY, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. 



476 



In 1817 Shelley returned to England, and after a short sojourn with 

 Leigh Hunt, with whom he first became intimate in 1813, he hired a 

 house at Marlow, where he resided nearly a year, and composed his 

 ' Revolt of Islam,' which contains many passages allusive to bis suffer- 

 ings from the Chancery decree which took his children from him, and 

 much vehement declamation as to bad laws and their evil administration. 

 While settled at Marlow he was distinguished by the most active bene- 

 volence to the poor, and experienced au attack of ophthalmia caught 

 while attending on them. ' Rosalind and Helen ' was also commenced 

 while at Marlow, but was not completed till the following year at Lucca. 

 In March 1818 he quitted England never to return. He was unwell 

 and depressed, but recovered on reaching Milan ; and while travelling 

 about Italy he wrote three acts of his 'Prometheus Unbound.' In 

 March 1819 he reached Rome, where he remained some time, and 

 translated Plato's ' Symposium,' removing to Florence towards the end 

 of the year, where he added a fourth act to his ' Prometheus.' In 

 May 1819 he was again at Rome, where he wrote his tragedy of 'The 

 Cenci,' which was offered to Mr. Harris, then manager of Covent 

 Garden Theatre, for representation, Shelley considering that the cha- 

 racter of Beatrice was adapted for Miss O'Neil ; but Harris pronounced 

 the subject of the tragedy to be so objectionable that he could not even 

 submit the part to that lady for her perusal, but promised however 

 that another tragedy, with a less offensive plot, should be accepted. 

 While at Rome Shelley lost his eldest son by his second marriage, and 

 he removed successively to Florence, Leghorn, and the baths of San 

 Giulianp, near Pisa. In 1819 he wrote 'The Witch of Atlas,' after a 

 pedestrian excursion to Monte San Pelegrino. In 1820 he wrote 

 'Julian and Maddalo,'in which, under those names, he has given a 

 dialogue between himself and Lord Byron. In 1821 he produced his 

 ' Epipsychidion ; ' ' Adonais,' a monody on the death of Keats ; and 

 'Hellas,' written to promote the cause of the Greeks, whose insurrection 

 under Ypsilanti had just commenced. He had previously written odes 

 in favour of the efforts making for freedom in Spain and Naples ; but 

 these matters were not in his vein, and they are laboured and ineffective. 

 On the 8th of July, in company of a Mr. Williams, who like himself 

 was greatly attached to aquatic excursions, he left Leghorn in a small 

 sailing-boat to return to his wife and family at St. Arengo ; but they 

 were caught in a storm, and perished. His body was washed ashore, 

 and as the quarantine laws of Tuscany required that everything so 

 found should be burnt, all the efforts of Mr. DawkinB, the English 

 charge-d' affaires, could only procure permission that his ashes, when 

 the body was consumed, should be given up to his family. The incre- 

 mation was performed in the presence of Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, 

 and others; and his ashes were subsequently deposited in a tomb 

 in the Protestant burying-ground at Rome, near the grave of 

 Keats. 



We have thus gone through the chief events of his life, and given 

 the dates of his principal publications, but in addition he had written 

 a multitude of minor poems, some of singular beauty, tales, and mis- 

 cellanies in prose, and many translations, of which those from Schiller's 

 ' Wallenstein ' and from Calderon possess great excellence. His trans- 

 lations from tho Greek are exquisite, and drew loud praises from the 

 'Quarterly Review.' They may be considered as the best in our 

 language. His version of ' Faust,' a fragment of which is published, 

 though admirable in spirit and effect, is not faultless with regard to 

 meaning. Several of his prose productions and a selection from his 

 letters were published by his widow in 2 vols. in 1840. 



Of his character as a man and a poet there was for a considerable 

 time much discrepancy of opinion. In a notice of his death, the 

 ' Gentleman's Magazine' for September 1822, says he was well known 

 by " his infamous novels and poems," and he was frequently accused 

 of being an atheist and a blasphemer, an accusation sanctioned by the 

 judgment of the lord chancellor in removing his children from his 

 care. We cannot help thinking that a man so just, so honest, so 

 benevolent, so faithful in friendship as he frequently proved himself, 

 so bold in defence of the oppressed, so tolerant of opposition, and so 

 amenable to the laws of society even where he disapproved of them, 

 so thorough a hater of vice, meanness, and all sorts of tyranny, could 

 scarcely have been an intentional blasphemer in the sense in which 

 that term is usually accepted. The mistake has arisen we think in a 

 misapprehension of his character, and a want of consideration of the 

 circumstances in which he was placed. No man perhaps was more 

 essentially a poet ; " glancing from earth to heaven " he was indeed of 

 " imagination all compact ; " and the strength of his creative faculty, 

 like that displayed in early childhood, overpowered even his expe- 

 rience. It is told that when fully grown he occupied himself for 

 hours in sailing paper boats ; no doubt with as true a realisation of 

 his inward ideas as a child with a doll. His imagination gave them 

 reality and importance, and they were bases for vast superstructures 

 like the soap-bubbles of Sir Isaac Newton. 



Brought up under a coarse, hard, immoral, and unforgiving father, 

 he was early forced to look on the evil prevailing in life, and led to 

 doubt the truths of a religion which his father professed but did not 

 practise. To these doubts, before his judgment could rectify them, 

 he gave a " local habitation and a name." The harshness he expe- 

 rienced aroused resentment without bringing conviction of his error's. 

 He was blind and perverse in his notions of Christianity, but he is 

 nowhere an atheist. He always acknowledges an over-ruling power, 



and he believed in the immortality of the soul. If his works are 

 examined impartially it will be found that what he really meant to 

 attack were the vices, tho corruptions, and the atrocities which had 

 been committed under the name of religion. In all his poems he 

 uniformly denounces vice and immorality in every form ; and hia 

 descriptions of love, which are numerous, are always refined and 

 delicate, with even less of sensuousness than many of our most 

 admired writers. It is true that he decried marriage, but not in 

 favour of libertinism ; and the evils he depicts or laments are those 

 arising from the indissolubility of the bond, or from the opinions of 

 society as to its necessity, opinions to which he himself submitted by 

 marrying the woman to whom he was attached. His general conduct 

 indeed tends to show that his opinions were by no means inflexible, 

 and it is probable that had life been spared him, he might with 

 maturer years have worked himself free from many errors. When, 

 in 1821, his ' Queen Mab ' was piratically published, he wrote to the 

 ' Examiner ' a letter disavowing its issue, and in it he says : " Whilst 

 I exonerate myself from all share in having divulged opinions hostile 

 to existing sanctions, under the form, whatever it may be, which they 

 assume in this poem, it is scarcely necessary for me to protest against 

 the system of inculcating the truth of Christianity or the excellence 

 of Monarchy, however true or however excellent they may be, by such 

 equivocal arguments as confiscation or imprisonment, and invective 

 and slander, and the insolent violation of the most sacred ties of nature 

 and society." 



Hia strength of imagination is at once the source of the beauty and 

 the defects of his poetry. The " airy nothings " which he embodies 

 in gorgeous forms and happy similitudes, expressed iu the most har- 

 monious language, draw the reader on almost imperceptibly, until 

 perhaps stern common sense will ask what he really means, and 

 whether the instances of vice, misrule, and disorder, which he depicts, 

 are not magnified by his fancy from some almost imperceptible 

 realities. As a consequence, his poems possess but little human 

 interest : his characters are abstractions ; his scenes of felicity are 

 Utopian ; the whole seems little better than a splendid phantasma- 

 goria. One exception may be made 'The Cenci;' here the characters 

 are well developed, but under such horrible circumstances, that 

 the heroic self-sacrifice and soft womanly feelings of Beatrice even 

 under the influence of her burning revenge, with the marvellous har- 

 mony of the versification in which she expresses herself, cannot 

 reconcile us to her, or overcome our feelings of disgust to the whole 

 drama. Mrs. Shelley states that he fancied he had an equal fond- 

 ness for poetry and for metaphysics, but that the former prepon- 

 derated. She thinks that he possessed "two remarkable qualities of 

 intellect a brilliant imagination, and a logical exactness of reason." 

 His logic was of that character in which imagination first laid down 

 the premises, and his conclusions might be then admissible ; but of 

 a logical faculty in the ordinary sense he had almost none as far as 

 exhibited in his writings. His bold and striking impersonations form a 

 distinguishing characteristic of hia poetry. He gives to inanimate 

 objects the attributes of humanity or volition with surprising effect. 

 But even in his best efforts there always remains an obscurity and a 

 dreaminess which will probably ever prevent his poems being exten- 

 sively read. He more than once attempted satire ; but he wants point 

 and heartiness; he is vehement, but not earnest. In many of his lyrics, 

 where the shortness of his subject prevented his wandering into his self- 

 formed world, his defects are in a great degree avoided, and he is often 

 peculiarly happy. In his ' Prometheus Unbound ' he has shown him- 

 self thoroughly impregnated with the spirit of the Grecian drama. 

 It is full of the spirit of beauty ; and the inexhaustible piay of fancy 

 and imagination flashing through every part of it dazzles the mind so 

 that we see but indistinctly ; and here, as in all his other poems, his 

 command of language has been equalled but by few. His reputation 

 as a poet has gradually widened since his death, and has not yet 

 reached its culminating point. He was the poet of the future of an 

 ideal futurity and hence it was that his own age could not entirely 

 sympathise with him. He has been called the ' Poet of Poets ' a 

 proud title, and in some respects deserved. 



On the death of his father, Sir Timothy Shelley, in 1844, his son 

 by his second wife, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, who was born in 1819, 

 succeeded to the title and estates; his son by the first marriage 

 having died young. 



SHELLEY, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, was born in 1703. In 

 1816, while in Italy, she wrote her powerful and striking romauce of 

 ' Frankenstein,' which commanded an extensive popularity in England, 

 and is still a favourite with the admirers of the wild and wonderful, 

 while the extremely ingenious and consistent development of the 

 character of the monster excites and sustains a human interest amidst 

 all its improbabilities. Though her success was great in this her first 

 effort, it did not induce Mrs. Shelley to resume her pen for some time. 

 She devoted herself to promoting the comfort and guarding the health 

 of her husband with affectionate solicitude, which he gratefully 

 acknowledged and repaid. Just previous to his unfortunate death 

 however she had finished ' Valperga,' a novel, afterwards printed in 

 3 vols., for which Shelley says in one of his last letters that she had 

 been offered 400, which he designed for the relief of the necessities 

 of his father-in-law, W. Godwin. After her husband's deatli she 

 published 'Falkland,' 'The Last Man,' and 'The Fortunes of I'erkin 



