THE SHELLEYS OF SUSSEX. Medwin's Blunders--Lady Shelley's Statement of The Case--The Michelgrove Shelleys--Sir William Shelley, Justice of The Common Pleas--The Castle Goring Shelleys--Their Pedigree at the Heralds' College--Evidences of the Connexion of the Two Families--John Shelley, 'Esquire and Lunatic'--Timothy Shelley, the Yankee Apothecary--Bysshe Shelley's Career--His Runaway Match with Catherine Michell--His Marriage with the Heiress of Penshurst--His Great Wealth--The Poet's Alleged Pride in his Connexion with the Sidneys--His Gentle, but not Aristocratic, Lineage. So much has been written in the ways of sycophancy or vaingloriousness about Shelley's Norman descent and aristocratic quality, it is necessary to glance at some of the facts of his ancestral story. The poet's friend, from the time when they were schoolfellows at Brentford, Thomas Medwin the Younger, was also the poet's kinsman--his third cousin, through Sir Bysshe Shelley's marriage with Mary Catherine Michell, and his second cousin, through Sir Timothy Shelley's marriage with Elizabeth Pilford. It might have been supposed that a biographer, thus related to Shelley by blood and friendship, would know the prime facts of his friend's pedigree, and state them without egregious error. But poor Tom Medwin was not remarkable for accuracy. To rely in this affair on the whilom _littérateur_ and cavalry officer, is to believe that the poet was a lineal descendant of Sir John Shelley of Maresfield Park, who was created a baronet in 1611; to believe that this Sir John Shelley's son (William) was a Justice of the Common Pleas; and to believe that the poet's great-grandfather (Timothy Shelley, of Fen Place, Co. Sussex) was a lineal descendant, in the ninth descent, of the aforesaid baronet of James the First's time. 'I will only say,' Medwin remarks lightly, 'that Sir John Shelley, of Maresfield Park, who dated his Baronetage from the earliest creation of that title in 1611, had besides other issue, two sons, Sir William, a Judge of the Common Pleas, and Edward; from the latter of whom, in the seventh descent, sprung Timothy, who also had two sons, and settled--having married an American lady--at Christ's Church, Newark, in North America.'