After keeping his terms at the same Oxford College, from which his son was expelled in the following century, Mr. Timothy Shelley made 'the grand tour,' returning in due course with a smattering of French, an extremely bad picture of the Eruption of Vesuvius, and 'a certain air' (if Medwin may be trusted) of having seen the world. Having surveyed mankind in European capitals, and entered middle age, he married Miss Elizabeth Pilfold, a gentlewoman of good family and great beauty, who is lightly regarded by the Shelleyan enthusiasts, because, in the conflict of her husband and her son, she held loyally to the former, and declined to be the partisan of the latter. It has even been urged to this lady's discredit that, when her wilful boy would fain have shaken his sister's confidence in the doctrines of the Church of England, she, in her mental narrowness, was alarmed for the spiritual safety of her girls, and thought it well that at least for a time they should be guarded from his influence.
Had these parents foreseen the trouble that would come to them from their first-born child, they would have welcomed him coldly on his arrival in the room (at Field Place), one of whose walls has in recent time been illustrated with this inscription:--
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY WAS BORN IN THIS CHAMBER AUGUST 4TH, 1792. SHRINE OF THE DAWNING SPEECH AND THOUGHT OF SHELLEY SACRED BE TO ALL WHO BOW WHERE TIME HAS BROUGHT GIFTS TO ETERNITY.
Of Shelley, the little fellow of Dr. Greenlaw's school at Brentford, we know much from Tom Medwin's occasionally accurate pages, and from other sources of information, which enable us to check the statements of that more entertaining than reliable biographer. Respecting Shelley at Eton, there is almost a redundance of evidence. Of the Etonian's ways of amusing himself at Field Place during his holidays, there is no lack of information;--thanks to Miss Hellen Shelley's goodness in committing all she could remember of her brother to paper, for the assistance of his biographer and fellow-collegian, Hogg, the cynical humourist and clever lawyer. But of Shelley, the nursling of the Field Place nursery, and child of the Field Place schoolroom, few facts are on the record;--scarcely anything besides the three or four matters, which Miss Hellen placed amongst her personal recollections, as matters of domestic tradition, coming to her from times before she was of an age to take clear and enduring cognizance of her brother's doings.