Himself a glutton of horrible tales, the Etonian-at-home was ever ready with a harrowing narrative of tragic crime and ghastly consequences, when the girls begged him to tell them something terrible, by the flickering light of their play-room fire. He overflowed, also, with stories about the alchemist, Cornelius Agrippa, who was represented as living up aloft in a spacious garret, under the roof of Field Place, directly over the heads of the excited children, grouped about this playroom’s only source of light. To their frequent entreaties for a personal introduction to the mysterious and benevolent Cornelius, Percy used to assure his sisters that in due course they should see the philosopher, his books, his lamp, his venerable beard, when he should migrate from the garret to the cave, soon to be dug for him in the orchard, and furnished with all the apparatus needful for his investigations and experiments.
At other times Percy entertained his sisters with anecdotes of the Great Tortoise, that had lived for centuries and grown to enormous magnitude in and near Warnham Pond. What he told them of the fabulous tortoise does not appear. It is so difficult to get anything but turtle-soup and hair-combs out of a tortoise of any kind, one would like to know how the boy contrived to inspire his auditors with a vivid interest in this creature of his imagination. To do so he may be presumed to have talked freely and with wild disregard for the teaching of the best authorities on natural history.
Towards the close of his Eton time (or possibly somewhat later, between his withdrawal from Eton and departure for Oxford) Percy Bysshe discarded the Big Tortoise and replaced it with the Great Snake, that was supposed to have lived for three hundred years in the Field Place gardens, before it was killed by the scythe of the careless or ruthless gardener, during the childhood of its imaginative historian. Biographers, who smile at the Shelleyan girls for putting faith in their brother’s taradiddles about the Big Tortoise, are firm believers in his taradiddles about the monstrous and Venerable Serpent. Indeed, they are apt to be indignant with flippant sceptics, who declare themselves as ready to believe in the Warnham Tortoise as in the Field Place Snake. How the snake had amused itself for three hundred years in the grass and flower-beds of the garden is not on the record. Nor does it appear how the young historian came upon the evidence of its longevity.
At Oxford, Hogg heard strange tales of the Field Place Snake; and listening to them, as they came from his young friend’s lips, the hard-headed north-countryman may well have wondered why his young friend told so many more lies than were necessary. But if Hogg dismissed the Great Snake legends from his mind, as mere levities undeserving of remembrance, some of the poet’s historians would have them treated more respectfully. Believing in the Great Snake, and gushing over it in a style that appears slightly comical to unbelievers, Mr. Buxton Forman ejaculates, ‘We think of these things, and remember the anecdote of the “great old snake” of Field Place, beloved of the little Percy, and killed by the scythe of the gardener, and almost wonder what inarticulate dirge the little boy uttered over his mutilated favourite’!!! It still remains for a Royal Academician to put on canvas this pathetic scene:—The Child Shelley uttering an inarticulate dirge over the corse of his mutilated favourite, whilst the remorseless and all unfeeling gardener pursues his daily wages with the fatal knife.
Other facts touching the Etonian may be gleaned from Miss Hellen Shelley’s letters, or the pages of less delightful writers. Sometimes he is seen taking his sisters for country walks. At other times he is seen on his pony, riding, perhaps, to ‘the meet’ of his grandsire’s hounds; for much as he loved money, and much as he may have grudged the cost of his kennel, old Sir Bysshe kept hounds, and a huntsman and ‘whips’ almost to the last. There were times when he walked forth shooting, with a gun in his hand and a dog at his heels. On one occasion the humour seized him to don the garb of a farmer’s hind, and bearing a truss of hay on his back walk across the Field Place lawn, and under the very windows through which his sisters were looking. It was, doubtless, some two years or more before this bit of rural masquerading, that he used to walk out in the evening, to look at the moon and stars, moving to and fro in the park, and in the Warnham lanes, with the butler at his heels, to watch over him and take care of him. There was also a day, when this—in his sisters’ eyes, so marvellous—Etonian spoke to them seriously of his intention to buy a little gipsy-girl, and train her to love him and depend upon him. But nothing in all Miss Hellen Shelley’s reminiscences is more eloquent of the pride she took in her marvellous brother, than her recollection of the pleasure she took in admiring ‘the beautifully fitting silk pantaloons,’ and other sumptuous raiment he was allowed to order ‘according to his own fancy at Eton.’ Little Hellen’s delight was perfect when she saw this exemplary Etonian standing, after the fashion of men and boys, with his back to the fire, posturing, and playing with his coat-tails, so as to display his slight figure and exquisite nether-garments to the best advantage. What though this superb brother now and then stained his little sister’s pinafores and frocks with lunar-caustic, and otherwise injured them with the chemicals he used in his scientific experiments?
Going to Eton in 1806 (probably in the early autumn) Shelley left the school in disgrace, some time towards the close of 1809. The exact date of his withdrawal from the college has never been revealed by the authorities of Field Place, who have been no less reticent respecting the circumstances that resulted in his premature removal from the seminary, where he failed to win the approval of the masters, though he succeeded eventually in making himself acceptable to the boys. Why Lady Shelley, writing ‘from authentic sources,’ was thus silent on particulars of no slight moment, the present writer makes no suggestion. All he can say positively on these points is that Shelley left the school in disgrace, which there is reason for thinking he richly merited, and left it at the time already stated. His Eton career, therefore, cannot have exceeded three years by very many weeks. In so short a time, however, he endured more suffering than falls to the lot of an ordinary schoolboy, and at the same time achieved a reputation that long survived his departure from the school, and would have lived for several years in its traditions, even if his subsequent career had not given his former comrades at the famous seat of learning, other and stronger reasons for holding him in remembrance.
On the girlish side of his nature, Bysshe was no boy to conciliate the riotous, overbearing urchins of the public school. When the masculine elements of his constitution came to be in the ascendant, he made enemies of the masters; and at Eton, in ‘old Keate’s time,’ to have a bad character with the masters was to come under the lash of a gentleman who surpassed Mulcaster and Busby as a severe disciplinarian. If any kind of posthumous renown is better than none, this gentleman may be numbered amongst the fortunate members of his profession; for his fame will not perish so long as Orbilius is remembered. Shelley soon learnt that Dr. Greenlaw’s hand was light in comparison with the hand of the Etonian master-in-chief; that his rods were feathers in comparison with the implements of torture wielded by Dr. Keate. Succeeding a head-master, the mildness of whose rigour had rendered him the scorn of pedagogues and the jest of schoolboys, Dr. Keate ascended his throne with a purpose of restoring the discipline of the school to the ancient standard of Etonian severity. Just the man to accomplish this ambition, he failed only by raising the discipline something higher than the standard he proposed to his energies. It is recorded of this squat, stout, thickset, crooked-legged man, that a look of cruel glee played over his countenance as he conned the names of a heavy flogging-bill. A man of humour and a lover of good cheer, he was a hospitable entertainer; and it has been told admiringly of him, how he would leave his guests over their wine, and half-an-hour later return to them with heightened gaiety after flogging a batch of gentlemanly young culprits. If he has not been strangely maligned by history and tradition, he used to stand for the hour together over the penal block with his right shoulder well thrown back, and his right arm moving like a piece of machinery. He is said to have flogged eighty boys on a single morning, throwing his whole force into every stripe, smiling grimly as he went on in the path of duty, and finally retiring to his breakfast with an air of serene complacence pervading the visage, that bore so striking a resemblance to the visage of a bull-dog. Prominence is here given to these matters out of deference to those of the Shelleyan enthusiasts who, like Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley, insist that harsh and ferocious schoolmasters are to be held accountable for whatever was slightly amiss in the poet, before he shone forth a faultless creature.
Arising in no way from deficiency of materials, which, save in respect to one or two matters, are superabundant for the biographer’s purpose, the chief difficulty in describing Shelley’s course at Eton is the difficulty of discriminating between the trustworthy and delusive materials, and especially of separating the threads of pure fact from the threads of pure fiction used in about equal proportion in the manufacture of statements that, without the exercise of cautious and nice discernment, might be accepted as wholly true or altogether devoid of evidential value. For instance, in dealing with the statements by Mr. Packe, touching Shelley’s career at Eton—statements to which Lady Shelley accords her unqualified credence and conclusive ‘imprimatur’—it is by no means easy to separate the threads of truth from the threads of fable.
‘Among my latest recollections of Shelley’s life at Eton,’ says Mr. Packe, at the end of his letter, ‘is the publication of Zastrozzi, for which, I think, he received 40l. With part of the proceeds he gave a most magnificent banquet to eight of his friends, among whom I was included.’
In these few words there are three mis-statements. As Shelley left Eton in the later part of 1809, and Zastrozzi was not published before the 5th of June (or, at the earliest, before the end of May), 1810, it is certain that the publication of the novel was no incident of Shelley’s life at the school. It being certain that Shelley received never a farthing of publisher’s money for the absurd performance, Mr. Packe must have been wrong in saying the author was paid 40l. for it. [Mr. Packe’s words, ‘for which, I think, he received 40l.,’ are, of course, to be read ‘for which he received, I think, 40l.’—i.e. as the statement of a witness, certain that a considerable sum was paid, though uncertain whether 40l. was the precise sum.] As the author received no money for the book, he cannot have given ‘with part of the proceeds’ (i.e. part of nothing) ‘a most magnificent banquet to eight of his friends.’ But though he gives three pieces of delusive evidence in three lines of type, it does not follow that the lines are of no evidential value. An honest person, writing in good faith, Mr. Packe may be fairly regarded as a person, remembering something about Zastrozzi in connexion with Eton (where the novel, or some part of it, was certainly written); with remembering something, also, of Shelley’s farewell feast to a party of friends at Eton; with remembering, moreover (or, at least, believing that he remembered), that Shelley was said to have been paid 40l., more or less, for the literary production. These recollections (albeit the recollections of a very mistaken and very much misinformed witness) are not to be rejected as altogether valueless, but kept in reserve as honest statements and possibly veritable recollections, unfit to be used as testimony by themselves, but quite fit to be used in confirmation of similar recollections by other people. Could it be shown in like way that each of the other guests, either at the time of the banquet or some time afterwards, was under the impression that the feast was paid for with publisher’s money, no person competent to sift and weigh evidence would hesitate in coming to the conclusion that the banquet was given by Shelley as a thing bought with money he had received from a publisher,—that the common impression of the eight independent witnesses was the result of representations made by the giver of the feast.