From the few glimpses to be had of him in Miss Hellen Shelley's letters, and Medwin's reminiscences, and from bits of testimony which, though found in records of his later boyhood, are evidential to certain particulars of his earlier infancy, the cautious historian can produce the principal characteristics of the little fellow, who used to play with his sisters in the Field Place gardens, and ride on his pony about the Warnham lanes, in years anterior to his first departure from home for boarding-school. It is manifest that the child, who from his seventh to his eleventh year went daily to the Warnham Vicar for instruction in Latin, and received his other lessons in his sisters' schoolroom, may be thought of as a shy, nervous, timid, small-headed urchin; tall for his years, but delicately fashioned. Narrow-chested and slightly round-shouldered, he had the look of a little fellow, scarcely strong enough to enjoy the sports of robust children. A slight slip of a lad, more given to loitering than running about the Field Place gardens; more often seen sitting by the fire, than dancing on the carpet of his sisters' play-room; he was gentle in his happier moods with a girlish gentleness, and sometimes fretful with a girlish fretfulness. Deficient in boyishness, the boy had a face, chiefly remarkable for the fawn-like prominence of its deep blue eyes, the delicate, though imperfect, shapeliness of its mouth, the rather comical meanness of its little tip-tilted nose, and the red-and-white of its singularly bright complexion; the general girlishness of his appearance being heightened by the profusion of the silky hair, falling and flowing in blond-brown ringlets about his long neck and weedy shoulders. Years later, musing on his conception of his former self, when he preferred the society of his little sister to the company of the rough boys of the Vicar's schoolroom, Shelley wrote in _Rosalind and Helen_, of Helen's docile child:-- 'He was a gentle boy, And in all gentle sports took joy; Oft in a dry leaf for a boat, With a small feather for a sail, His fancy on that spring would float, If some invisible breeze would stir Its marble calm.' In like manner, 'Abdallah' and 'Maimuna' (the little Bysshe and Bessie of _The Assassins_) used to float their toy-boats upon the water of their smiling creek. Shelley's delight in toy-flotillas may have arisen for the first time (as some of his biographers aver) long after his childhood. Possibly he was the fool of his own fancy in thinking he cared to play with toy-boats in his infancy. It is, however, certain, that gentleness characterized the child, who, on attaining manhood, meditated complacently on the delight he took in gentle sports when he was a gentle boy.