The Poet's Father--Shelley's Birth and Birth-Chamber--Miss Hellen Shelley's Recollections--The Child-Shelley's Pleasant Fiction--His Aspect at Tender Age--His Description of his own Nose--The Indian-Ink Sketch--Miss Curran's 'Daub'--Williams's Water-Colour Drawing--Clint's Composition--Engravings of 'The Daub' and 'The Composition'--The Poet's Likeness in Marble--Shelley and Byron--Peacock and Hogg on Shelley's Facial Beauty--The Colnaghi Engraving. Whatever the failings of the Newark apothecary's younger son, it must be recorded to his credit that he gave his son an education befitting the chief of a territorial family. Inferior though he was in tact and politeness to the great Chesterfield, whose precepts and example are said to have been largely accountable for his manners and morality, Mr. Timothy Shelley (Sir Bysshe's son and heir by Mary Catherine Michell) received the training, and, notwithstanding the eccentricities that provoked the smiles of London drawing-rooms, had the port and temper of an English gentleman. It has been the fashion of biographers to decry this gentleman. Readers, however, should decline to accept the poet's estimate of the second baronet of Castle Goring, though the much-maligned gentleman wrote comically ungrammatical letters, thought too highly of himself, talked boastfully over his second bottle, swore well up to the mark of Georgian good breeding, and believed himself the originator of every strenuous argument in Paley's _Evidences_. The good landlord and kindly patron of aged servants, the squire whose virtues blossomed in the dust, the amiable father whose parental excellences were gratefully remembered by all his surviving children, was neither the fool nor the barbarian his eldest son thought him. The Shelleyan enthusiasts have little charity for the poet's sire, even the most discreet of them regarding him as a deplorably inconvenient father for so marvellous a son. It is not clear what kind of father would have won Percy's filial loyalty. In fairness to this sire, it should be remembered that, if he was not the right kind of father for the poet, he proved an excellent father to all his other children; and that, if the poet should have had a more congenial father, Squire Timothy could not well have had a more trying son than the boy of latent genius, who lived to cover his house with glory.