In the beginning he had written to amuse himself and his readers; he had catered to their sentimentalism and their folly. But in the end he came to despise his readers, and wrote only to shock them. They had made a world of lies; and one man would tell them the truth. That is why today we rank him as a world force in the history of letters. We are no longer the least bit thrilled by his wickedness; we think of such things as pathological and are moved only to pity. We do not see anything picturesque about a great lord who travels over Europe with a train of horses and carriages, dogs, fowls, monkeys, servants, and mistresses; the Sunday supplements of our newspapers have over-supplied us with such material. But we are interested in a poet who possessed a clear eye and a clear brain, who saw the truth, and spoke it to all Europe, and helped to set free the future of the race. CHAPTER LVIII THE ANGEL OF REVOLT Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, which made him four years younger than Byron. His father was the richest baronet in the county of Sussex, a great landlord and a ferocious Tory, who typified the spirit of his age and drove his son almost to madness. The boy was sent to school at Eton, a dreadful place inhabited by gnomes who wear all day the clothes which our little rich boys wear to evening parties, and the hats which our grown-up rich boys wear to the opera. They had a system of child slavery known as “fagging,” and Shelley revolted against it and was tortured. He was a swift, proud spirit, made frantic by the sight or even the thought of tyranny; so sensitive that he swooned at the scent of the flowers in the Alpine valleys. He was gifted with a marvelous mind, ravenous for knowledge, and absorbing it at incredible speed. He went to Oxford, where at the age of nineteen he published a pamphlet entitled, “The Necessity for Atheism.” A reading discloses that the title might better have been “The Necessity for Abolishing Ecclesiasticism Masquerading as Christianity.” But it is not likely that such a change of title would have helped Shelley, who was unceremoniously kicked out of the university, and cast off by the Tory baronet who controlled his purse-strings.