Under the manifold vexations and sorrows that preyed upon his feelings at Sion House, Shelley found solace and intermissions of grief in the perusal of blue books,--no folios of parliamentary manufacture and information; but the little blue-covered volumes of extremely exciting and unwholesome prose-fiction, that were to be bought at sixpence a-piece of ordinary booksellers in the earlier decades of the present century. He was also a greedy devourer of tales (touching haunted castles, magicians, picturesque brigands, and mysterious murderers) that proceeded from writers, who did not condescend to offer their productions to the public eye, in the vulgar little 'blue books,' or in any form less acceptable to connoisseurs of elegant literature than board-bound volumes. It is something to the honour of prose-fiction that the two greatest poets of the nineteenth century may be said to have been mentally suckled and reared on novels from infancy to adult age,--taught by novels how to think and feel, and how to make others think and feel. It is alike true of Byron and Shelley, that the germs of much that is most delightful and admirable in their finest poems must be sought in old novels. John Moore's _Zeluco_ was not more influential in the production of _Childe Harold_, than _Zofloya or the Moor_ was influential in the production of _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_, those crude and unutterably ridiculous achievements of Shelley's youthful pen, which, offering to their amused perusers the feeble fancies and puerile conceits that, appearing and reappearing in successive volumes, developed eventually into vigorous creations and exquisite examples of poetic imagery,--exhibit also the rude notions and embryonic reasonings, that in the course of a few years grew and shaped themselves in the fundamental principles and main features of his philosophy on matters pertaining to politics, social economy, and religion. It is a question whether the recollections of misery endured at school, which occupy three of the familiar stanzas to 'Mary,' should be regarded as reminiscences of trials the poet underwent at Sion House, or of sorrows that moved him to tears at Eton. Mrs. Shelley had no doubt the stanzas referred to the public school; and Lady Shelley is no less confident that her father-in-law was thinking of the Eton playing-grounds, when he wrote in the dedicatory prelude to _Laon and Cythna_: 'Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass; I do remember well the hour which burst My spirit's sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was, When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, And wept, I knew not why; until there rose From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas! Were but one echo from a world of woes-- The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.