First year at Eton--Creation of the Castle-Goring Baronetcy--Sir Bysshe Shelley's Last Will--Timothy Shelley's Children--Miss Hellen Shelley's Recollections--The Etonian at Home--The Big Tortoise--The Great Snake--Dr. Keate--Mr. Packe at fault--Walter Halliday--Mr. Hexter--Mr. Bethell--Fagging--Mad Shelley--'Old Walker'--Enthusiasm for Natural Science--The Rebel of the School--Lord High Atheist--Dr. Lind's Pernicious Influence on Shelley--Poetical Fictions about Dr. Lind--Shelley's Illness at Field Place--His Monstrous Hallucination touching his Father--John Shelley the Lunatic--_Zastrozzi_--Premature Withdrawal from Eton.
Respecting the year of Shelley's first term at Eton, the authorities differ: one set of writers averring that he entered the school in his fourteenth year (1806), whilst other biographers record that he entered it in his fifteenth year (1807). Lady Shelley says, 'At the age of _thirteen_ Shelley went to Eton.' On the other hand, the usually exact Thomas Love Peacock says, 'On leaving this academy' (_i.e._ Sion House) 'he was sent in his fifteenth year to Eton,' and Mr. William Rossetti says, 'He passed to Eton in his fifteenth year.' Though no prudent writer ventures to set aside lightly a date given by so careful and conscientious a biographer as the author of the _Memoir of Shelley_, I venture to think that Mr. Rossetti is at fault in this particular, having perhaps erred through reasonable reliance on the accuracy of Mr. Peacock, who seems, in taking a date from one of the books he was reviewing for _Fraser's Magazine_ (June, 1858), to have gone a barley-corn beyond Mr. Middleton's words. Instead of saying that Shelley _went_ to Eton in his fifteenth year for the first time, Mr. Middleton (in his _Shelley and his Writings_, 1858) keeps to historic truth in merely stating, 'In 1807, when Shelley was in his fifteenth year, we find him at Eton.' He neither says nor implies that the future poet could not have been found there in the previous year. On the contrary, his words indicate uncertainty as to the precise date of the poet's first appearance at the school. Gaining his knowledge of the poet's career at Eton from old Etonians who were schoolmates there, Mr. Middleton was probably instructed in this matter by an old Etonian who, whilst certain Shelley was at the school in 1807, could not speak positively to his being there in an earlier year.