to bear arms), are seldom famous for the qualities that render individuals gracious and existence delightful. If they endure for centuries, such families often do so by suffering for centuries. To account for the same revolting fancy, allowance must also be made for the morbid literature on which the boy had been mentally suckled from his tender infancy,--the tales of domestic horror and cruelties, in which he had revelled from early childhood. To the producers and readers of that literature, no character was more attractive than a wretched being unjustly dealt with as a lunatic by barbarous relations. It is at least probable that the stories of such cruelty, flowing as they did from the press in the period when Monk Lewis threw the audience of a crowded theatre into hysterical anguish by his monodrama of _The Captive_, may have inspired the boy with a morbid apprehension of life-long imprisonment in a mad-house. Even more likely to produce the same agonizing apprehension, were some of the more painful incidents of his life at Eton, if their terrorizing power was intensified by the knowledge that one of his not very remote collateral ancestors had been confined justly or unjustly as a lunatic. The nervous boy who was hunted and baited in the Eton playing-grounds, by a multitude of lads, shouting at the top of their voices, 'Mad Shelley, Mad Shelley, Mad Shelley!' had good reason to suspect that something in his behaviour and idiosyncrasy must have suggested the imputation of insanity. 'I have seen him,' says one of the spectators of these frequent scenes of cruelty and suffering, 'surrounded, hooted, baited like a maddened bull; and, at this distance of time (forty years after), I seem to hear ringing in my ears the cry which Shelley was wont to utter in his paroxysms of revengeful anger.' The torture, which made so deep and enduring an impression on the boy who only witnessed it, affected far more strongly the boy who was the object of the persecution. To the end of his life, the poet (given like Byron to brood over the sorrows of his childhood) used to speak with passionate resentment of the barbarous malice of the boys, who either exasperated him with an accusation they knew to be groundless, or, worse still (if they really thought him insane), mocked him for the affliction that entitled him to their compassion.