There is no need to inquire how the lovely face of Mr. Colnaghi's engraving came to be regarded as a portrait of Shelley in his childhood. Still less is there any need to inquire whether the original picture was the work of the exiled French prince to whom it has been attributed. The present writer has no wish to deal disrespectfully with any part of the picture's story that does not touch the poet's record. For this work's purpose it is enough to say authoritatively that the child, whose delicate and exquisitely symmetrical lineaments are exhibited in the Colnaghi engraving, cannot have been the infantile Shelley, because it is not in the nature of things that the poet of unsymmetrical visage and 'little turn-up nose' was the development of the child, whose facial loveliness was so perfect an example of facial symmetry, and whose nose could not by any possibility have changed into the tip-tilted feature, described so precisely by the poet himself. Portraits are often strangely mis-assigned; but it is seldom for a portrait to be so egregiously mis-assigned as this so-called picture of the child Shelley. Had not Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams succeeded in palming off on romantic credulity their symmetrical and straight-nosed 'composition' as a veritable picture of 'The Real Shelley,' it would never have occurred to any one to suggest that the original of the Colnaghi engraving was the poet Shelley at a tender age. CHAPTER IV. THE BRENTFORD SCHOOLBOY. Dr. Greenlaw's Character--Quality of his School--Medwin's Anecdotes to the Doctor's Discredit--Mr. Gellibrand's Recollections of the Brentford Shelley--The Bullies of the Brentford Playground--Shelley's Character at the School--His Disposition to Somnambulism--His Delight in Novels--His Wretchedness at School--Shelleyan Egotism--Byronic Egotism--Byron's Influence on Shelley--Enduring Influence of Novels on Shelley's Mind--Stories of Boating--Easter Holidays in Wiltshire--'Essay on Friendship'--Its Biographical Value. The slight slip of a boy, who under the name of Percy Bysshe Shelley, appeared for the first time in his eleventh year (the third year of the present century) amongst the boys of Dr. Greenlaw's school at Sion House, Brentford, was no child to prefer the society of overbearing boys to the society of his little sisters, whose playmate he had hitherto been.