At Brentford the girlish elements of Bysshe's nature were in the ascendant, the masculine elements altogether in abeyance. Possibly the latter elements had never manifested themselves at Field Place, where the little fellow, with younger sisters for his playmates, had lived at the end of his mother's apron-string something too long. If they had shown themselves in his earlier childhood, they seem to have retired from view during his stay at Dr. Greenlaw's school. Bearing a stronger likeness to the Geordie Byron, of Aberdeen High School, who fell a-weeping before his classmates, on being required for the first time to answer to the proud title of 'Dominus,' than to the Geordie Byron of the same school, who, notwithstanding his lameness, used to spring (in his hopping way) with clenched fists and flashing eyes at boys of superior size and strength, little Bysshe seems throughout his time at Sion House to have justified the disdain in which he was held, alike by the big and the small bullies of the dismal playground, as a chicken-heart and a milk-sop. His old schoolfellow, Gellibrand, who died something over twelve months in his ninety-third year, used to describe the Shelley of Dr. Greenlaw's seminary as a 'girl in boy's clothes, fighting with open hands and rolling on the floor when flogged, not from the pain, but "from a sense of indignity."' (_Vide_ Mr. Augustine Birrell's letter to the _Athenæum_ of 3rd May, 1884.) Scared and cowed by the first greetings of the playground, he seems never to have gained heart to learn the games, of which he had been compelled to confess a shameful ignorance, or to repay with boyish energy and in proper style the snubs and blows of boys as small as himself. Every boy's hand was raised against him; and when he raised his own in retaliation, it was to slap with open palm. What the big bullies bade him do, he did meekly and often to his cost. When they ordered him to run after their balls, he obeyed till he was ready to drop with fatigue. When they ordered him to fetch books from the circulating library, to 'truck' Latin dictionaries and other scholastic volumes (appraised by avoirdupois weight) with the grocer for lumps of cheese or sweetstuff, he broke bounds and did their commands, earning once and again a smart punishment 'from the Doctor,' by his submissiveness to lawless orders. But he never joined of his own will in the pastimes of his schoolfellows, great or small. Moping in corners by himself, when the other boys were playing clamorously at prisoners' bars or leap-frog, with their marbles or their tops, he counted the days till next breaking-up day, recalled the pleasures of the garden where his little sisters had been his sturdiest playmates, or conned the pages of stories, borrowed from the circulating library. Sometimes on half-holidays he loitered for the hour together under the southern wall of the playground, as far as possible out of the way of his uncongenial companions.