6 afford. It is at our own peril if we persist in straying down the slippery slopes over which we have already seen the guide we were following disappear. We know now all that is implied in the apparently innocent proposal to admit the people within the pale of the constitution.' We have learnt what is the end of that beginning. We have seen the drama acted through before our eyes its boastful opening, its fair-seeming progress, and its tragic close. We have watched that small germ of evil develop bit by bit the suffrage once relaxed lead to greater relaxations; the restraints which the law imposed upon the multitude one by one torn down; until every organ of the State, legislative, executive, and judicial, has successively become the passive mouthpiece of mob-law; and at last the reckless and needy partisans who rule under a government of mob-law have goaded each other into civil war. It is a spectacle which we should study deeply, for so striking a warning is rarely granted to a nation. If, in spite of it, we suffer the intrigues of politicians to lure us into democracy, we shall deserve our downfall, for we shall have perished by that wilful infatuation which no warning can dispel. NOTE to last Vol., Art. IV., p. 447.- Spiritual Destitution WE are informed by Mr. Bazely that he has never had a decorated altar nor an intoned service; that the late Mr. Green never attended his church, although he did sometimes attend another church at Poplar; and that Mr. Green was all along strongly connected with dissent. We hasten to acknowledge our mistake; and we have heard with regret that Mr. Bazely's zealous pastoral labours have proved too much for his strength and compelled him to go into retirement. THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.-1. The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs. Shelley. One Volume. London, 1854. 2. Life of P. B. Shelley. By Thomas Jefferson Hogg. London, 1858. Vols. I. and II. 3. Shelley Memorials from Authentic Sources. Edited by Lady Shelley. London, 1859. 4. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. By E. J. Trelawney. London, 1858. 5. Fraser's Magazine, Nos. 342 and 361, Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By T. L. Peacock. SHELL HELLEY has been unfortunate in his biographers. His widow interspersed her edition of his works with very interesting biographical notes; but they were only notes; she was not permitted to speak out. Mr. Hogg's two bulky volumes contain some lively descriptions of the poet's life at Oxford; but of their remaining contents it is hardly possible to speak with patience. Mr. Hogg is a clever man, and a lawyer, and, as he is constantly assuring us, a very fastidious person to boot; and yet he has less notion of what the things are which a biographer ought to relate, and of the order in which they should be told, than might have been expected from the clumsiest hack. His materials were valuable. Of the indiscretion with which some of them have been made public, we shall have something to say by-and-by; but those which are innocuous are so awkwardly arranged, that any but the most cautious reader is almost certain to be misled, both as to dates and still more important matters. Mr. Hogg has overlaid his book with autobiographical details which have no connexion whatever with his hero; and when he does condescend to tell us about Shelley, instead of telling us about himself, he is so unhappily destitute of the dramatic faculty which is indispensable to a biographer, that, while he talks of his friend as a Divine Poet, he represents him as a silly, conceited, half-crazy buffoon. We have no doubt that he began his task of describing Shelley with every amiable feeling, but we are just as little surprised that Shelley's nearest relations should have thought his portrait a caricature, and hastened to resume the family papers which they had intrusted to an artist so Vol. 110.-No. 220. unlucky. U unlucky. We have no such remark to make upon the little book in which they themselves have paid their proud and tender tribute to the memory which Mr. Hogg, as they say, has injured so grievously. Lady Shelley writes remarkably well; and the good feeling and generous ardour which she shows throughout, though they sometimes carry her too far, are worthy of her, and of her subject. But her book is not, and does not profess to be, a life. Still less can Mr. Peacock's valuable articles be supposed to make such a pretension. But if we have no good life of Shelley, we are already in possession of a Shelley Literature, quite extensive enough for a modest English poet. The reminiscences of friends and the estimates of admirers are becoming alarmingly numerous; and from such materials, read along with poems that are full of conscious and unconscious self-delineation, it is quite possible to form a tolerably clear notion of the outward events of Shelley's life, and of the man whom those events befel. Shelley was born on the 4th of August, 1792, the eldest son of Timothy Shelley, Esq., afterwards Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart. His father, an opulent country gentleman, was not an unkind, but a narrowminded, injudicious, and, if we may trust Mr. Hogg, singularly ridiculous person, and the affection which his son once felt for him was at an early period hopelessly alienated. Shelley declared at nineteen that he had known no tutor or adviser (not excepting his father) 'from whose lessons he had not recoiled with disgust; and yet he had received the education usual in his rank; but he was one to whom the ordinary training— masculine, but rough and unsympathetic-was not suited. He was sent very early to a school at Brentford, and afterwards to Eton; but his nerves were too sensitive and his imagination already too susceptible to make a great school anything but a place of misery to him. There was only one part of the business of either in which he seems to have been very successful. He wrote Latin verses, we are told, with marvellous facility. Lady Shelley, however, who preserves this circumstance, and who talks with some contempt of the trammels of the Gradus, tells us also that those youthful compositions were not in accordance with rule, and were generally torn up. Latin verses that are not in accordance with rule are bad Latin verses. But if Lady Shelley means, as we conjecture, to reproach the Eton authorities with having disregarded the poetic promise of their pupil, and concentrated their attention on false concords and false quantities, we must take the liberty to say that her censure is preposterous. The object of teaching boys to write Latin verses is not to make them poets, but to make them scholars; and Dr. Keate and his subordinates were bound, before all things, to insist on those excellences excellences which a Shelley could only attain by submitting to the same irksome drudgery as the most prosaic young cricketer in the school. Unhappily it is not only in verse writing that a public schoo offers, and can by possibility offer, no immunities to genius. Robinson Crusoe was never in so dreary a solitude as this sensitive, delicate young poet, while all the noise and frolic and life of a great school 'beat on his satiate ear.' At Brentford he would bask against the south wall, or stroll through the playground listless and dreamy, his excitable imagination wandering and wasting itself among the magicians, and fairies, and talismans, and spirits, of some kingdom in the air. At Eton he was rudely awakened from these incommunicable dreams. Several hundred boys were gathered together, vigorous in mind and body, and overflowing with animal spirits. Their superfluous activity and mischief delighted in tormenting the delicate lad who shrank from their horseplay, and burned with indignation when he saw their selfishness and cruelty. Even had he himself not suffered from them, he had no healthy boyish obtuseness to conceal from him those unamiable characteristics of youth. Coarser natures and stronger natures find a great deal both of profit and enjoyment in the struggles of our noble old schools. Mr. Thackeray even tells us how some of Dr. Keate's pupils can laugh, and rejoice, and become young again, while they recall the castigations of boyhood, and 'mimic to the best of their power the manner and mode of operating of the famous doctor. This one regarded the doctor's victims as if they had been Marshal Haynau's. He would not have thought it less heartless to make a jolly story of the one flagellation than of the other. And he saw no more good humour in a schoolfellow's clenched fist than in a master's birch-rod. He recoiled from the one and the other with a child's natural anger at what seems to be injustice; and with a 'schoolboy heat' and blind hysterical passion of personal independence, which Dr. Arnold would have regarded with no more favour than Dr. Keate. These feelings in him were far too keen and intense to allow of his seeing anything but the selfishness and strength of his schoolfellows. They were tyrants, and their tyranny was legalized and imitated by masters who allowed fagging, and who flogged; but he, at least, would submit to no such degradation: he would not be a fag. This resolve was little likely to diminish the persecution for which, in any case, his shy disposition and tenderness of nerve must have afforded in schoolboy eyes only too tempting an opportunity. We enter into no ingenious speculation as to what Shelley might have been had his course of U 2 training training been different; but it is certain that his hatred of all laws and ordinances must have been greatly aggravated by his experiences of Eton. If nature had bestowed upon him the capacity of feeling respect for authority at all, it was only at the feet of some wise Gamaliel that such a faculty could have been developed. The sole personage of that description with whom he came in contact has been depicted, for the benefit of posterity, in the Hermit that liberated Laon, and the wise Zonoras who taught Prince Athanase. But neither Zonoras nor the Hermit, among the lessons of 'philosophic wisdom calm and mild' with which they filled the souls of their pupils, ever thought of touching upon such themes as law or obedience, duty or self-control; nor did they hint at so delicate a distinction as that between government and oppression. The teaching of their prototype Dr. Lind did not differ in this respect from theirs. He was a physician and tutor, who treated the forlorn boy with a great deal of kindness, invited him to his house, tended him through a dangerous fever, and saved him also, as Shelley believedthough both the danger and the rescue were probably altogether imaginary-from being consigned in the opening of life to a lunatic asylum. But, amiable as he seems to have been, Mr. Hogg tells a strange story which shows that he was, to say the least, a very injudicious guide, philosopher, and friend for such a youth as Shelley. Dr. Lind, it appears, had been injured, or fancied he had been injured, by George III. Shelley stood in a similar position towards his own father; and therefore, to relieve their o'erburdened hearts, this pair of friends used to unite, after tea, in a solemn and vehement anathema, in which the father of one and the Sovereign of both were heartily devoted to the infernal gods. It was years afterwards at Oxford that Mr. Hogg had an opportunity of hearing the half-playful comminations of this unfilial young Ernulphus, who told him that it was from his friend Dr. Lind, at Eton, that he had learned to curse his father and the King. 6 He found at Oxford a milder discipline and a far more congenial atmosphere than that of Eton. From lectures he learned little, and had, or fancied that he had, little opportunity of learning. A college tutor, we are told, recommended him to read the Prometheus Vinctus,' and Demosthenes de Corona,' and Euclid,' and Aristotle's Ethics,' and left him to follow the advice or to neglect it, as he might think fit. Shelley regretted the absence of guidance far less than he was charmed with the absence of restraint. He could not be happy unless he could be free; and at Oxford he was perfectly free to devote himself to whatever researches of learning or discoveries in science |