The smallness of this allowance having been often adduced in evidence of Mr. Timothy Shelley's niggardliness to his eldest son, readers should recall what they have already been told respecting the pecuniary circumstances of the Squire of Field Place up to the date of his father's death, till which event he was by no means wealthy for his social position. Dependent on his father, who, loving money more passionately as his fingers grew more feeble, was incessantly bickering with his heir-apparent about the excesses of his expenditure, Mr. Timothy Shelley (with several children on his hands) could not make his son a larger allowance. Two hundred a-year was a far better bachelor's income seventy years since than it is now-a-days. Thirty years later it was still regarded as more than a sufficient allowance for a briefless barrister. Shelley was still only eighteen years old when it was allotted to him. Moreover at the time of the arrangement, it was not contemplated that it would be his only means of subsistence; for it was made in anticipation that he would be a frequent visitor at his father's house. Had he from early boyhood lived harmoniously with his father, and been a loving and dutiful son, Shelley in his nineteenth year could not reasonably have looked for a larger income from his father during his grandfather's life. Getting so handsome an allowance from his father so soon after his expulsion from Oxford, he was treated in money-matters with liberality by the father, who is generally conceived to have treated him with vindictive stinginess. These are the facts of the matter about which Lady Shelley writes in these words:-- 'Exasperated by his son's refusal to conform to the orthodox belief, he' (_i.e._ Timothy Shelley) 'forbade him to appear at Field Place. On the sensitive feelings of the young controversialist and poet, this sentence of exclusion from his boyhood's home inflicted a bitter pang; yet he was determined to bear it, for the sake of what he believed to be right and true.'