Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822
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 was not to be expected that a lad intolerant of rule and
disregardful of restriction, who neglected punctuality in the
performance of his exercises, while he spent his leisure in translating
half of Pliny's history, should win the approbation of pedagogues. At
the same time the inspired opponent of the fagging system, the scorner
of games and muscular amusements, could not hope to find much favour
with such martinets of juvenile convention as a public school is wont to
breed. At Eton, as elsewhere, Shelley's uncompromising spirit brought
him into inconvenient contact with a world of vulgar usage, while his
lively fancy invested the commonplaces of reality with dark hues
borrowed from his own imagination. Mrs. Shelley says of him, "Tamed by
affection, but unconquered by blows, what chance was there that Shelley
should be happy at a public school?" This sentence probably contains the
pith of what he afterwards remembered of his own school life, and there
is no doubt that a nature like his, at once loving and high-spirited,
had much to suffer. It was a mistake, however, to suppose that at Eton
there were any serious blows to bear, or to assume that laws of love
which might have led a spirit so gentle as Shelley's, were adapted to
the common stuff of which the English boy is formed. The latter mistake
Shelley made continually throughout his youth; and only the advance of
years tempered his passionate enthusiasm into a sober zeal for the
improvement of mankind by rational methods. We may also trace at this
early epoch of his life that untamed intellectual ambition--that neglect
of the immediate and detailed for the transcendental and
universal--which was a marked characteristic of his genius, leading him
to fly at the highest while he overleaped the facts of ordinary human
life. "From his earliest years," says Mrs. Shelley, "all his amusements
and occupations were of a daring, and in one sense of the term, lawless
nature. He delighted to exert his powers, not as a boy, but as a man;
and so with manly powers and childish wit, he dared and achieved
attempts that none of his comrades could even have conceived. His
understanding and the early development of imagination never permitted
him to mingle in childish plays; and his natural aversion to tyranny
prevented him from paying due attention to his school duties. But he was
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