But what was Lady Shelley about, when she--drawing her information from 'authentic sources,' and proclaiming the superiority of her book to all Shelleyan biographies from 'unauthentic sources'--allowed the three lines of Mr. Packe's letter, and other equally faulty lines of it, to go before the public as sure and trustworthy information? If biographies from 'authentic sources' are made up in this fashion, readers may with reason come to prefer biographies 'from unauthentic sources.' As Lady Shelley has forced her literary method and address into contrast with those of the man of letters, whom she discharged with strange discourtesy, she must not resent the assurance that the comparison she has provoked is not to Mr. Hogg's disadvantage.
In the sufficient evidences respecting Shelley at Eton, critical readers make the acquaintance of two very different Shelleys:--the girlish Shelley (of Mr. Walter Halliday's letter) who 'was not made to endure the rough and boisterous pastime at Eton,' never 'joined in the usual sports of the boys, and, what is remarkable, never went out in a boat on the river,' but preferred to ramble about Clewer, Frogmore, and Stoke Park, by himself, or with a single companion of congenial gentleness; and the combative Shelley, whose unruliness and contumacious behaviour to his masters gained for him the office and title of 'The Atheist' of the school. Differing little from the moping and discontented lad of his last year at Sion House, the girlish Etonian exhibits several points of resemblance to Byron in the earlier part of his unhappy time at Harrow; and in like manner when he has risen to be the arch-rebel of the school, the saucy and combative Etonian reminds one of the combative Byron, leading the riotous Harrovians, and rising with atheistical impudence against Dr. Butler's authority.
In one respect Shelley entered Eton under circumstances far more advantageous than those that caused Byron to hate his public school in the opening terms of his connexion with it. Unlike Byron, who went to Harrow, so badly prepared for its studies, that, had it not been for Dr. Drury's sympathetic consideration, he would have been put (to his poignant humiliation) in a form of quite little boys, much younger than himself, Shelley went to his public school well grounded in Latin and Greek. 'He had,' says Medwin, 'been so well grounded in the classics, that it required little labour for him to get up his daily lessons.' Medwin's testimony on this point is sustained by the evidence of Messrs. Packe and Halliday, two of the poet's contemporaries at Eton.