The common fruit of stalls, and oranges and apples were always welcome to Shelley; he would crunch the latter as heartily as a schoolboy. Vegetables, and especially salads, and pies and puddings were acceptable. His beverage consisted of copious and frequent draughts of cold water, but tea was ever grateful, cup after cup, and coffee. Wine was taken with singular moderation, commonly diluted largely with water, and for a long period he would abstain from it altogether. He avoided the use of spirits almost invariably, and even in the most minute portions.
Like all persons of simple tastes, he retained his sweet tooth. He would greedily eat cakes, gingerbread and sugar; honey, preserved or stewed fruit with bread, were his favourite delicacies. These he thankfully and joyfully received from others, but he rarely sought for them or provided them for himself. The restraint and protracted duration of a convivial meal were intolerable; he was seldom able to keep his seat during the brief period assigned to an ordinary family dinner.
These particulars may seem trifling, if indeed anything can be little that has reference to a character truly great; but they prove how much he was ashamed that his soul was in body, and illustrate the virgin abstinence of a mind equally favoured by the Muses, the Graces and Philosophy. It is true, however, that his application at Oxford, although exemplary, was not so unremitting as it afterwards became; nor was his diet, although singularly temperate, so meagre. However, his mode of living already offered a foretaste of the studious seclusion and absolute renunciation of every luxurious indulgence which ennobled him a few years later.
Had a parent desired that his children should be exactly trained to an ascetic life and should be taught by an eminent example to scorn delights and to live laborious days, that they should behold a pattern of native innocence and genuine simplicity of manners, he would have consigned them to his house as to a temple or to some primitive and still unsophisticated monastery.
It is an invidious thing to compose a perpetual panegyric, yet it is difficult to speak of Shelley, and impossible to speak justly, without often praising him. It is difficult also to divest myself of later recollections; to forget for a while what he became in days subsequent, and to remember only what he then was, when we were fellow-collegians. It is difficult, moreover, to view him with the mind which I then bore—with a young mind, to lay aside the seriousness of old age; for twenty years of assiduous study have induced, if not in the body, at least within, something of premature old age.
It now seems an incredible thing, and altogether inconceivable, when I consider the gravity of Shelley and his invincible repugnance to the comic, that the monkey tricks of the schoolboy could have still lingered, but it is certain that some slight vestiges still remained. The metaphysician of eighteen actually attempted once or twice to electrify the son of his scout, a boy like a sheep, by name James, who roared aloud with ludicrous and stupid terror, whenever Shelley affected to bring by stealth any part of his philosophical apparatus near to him.
As Shelley’s health and strength were visibly augmented, if by accident he was obliged to accept a more generous diet than ordinary, and as his mind sometimes appeared to be exhausted by never-ending toil, I often blamed his abstinence and his perpetual application. It is the office of a University, of a public institution for education, not only to apply the spur to the sluggish, but also to rein in the young steed, that, being too mettlesome, hastens with undue speed towards the goal.
“It is a very odd thing, but every woman can live with my lord and do just what she pleases with him, except my lady!” Such was the shrewd remark, which a long familiarity taught an old and attached servant to utter respecting his master, a noble poet.
We may wonder in like manner, and deeply lament, that the most docile, the most facile, the most pliant, the most confident creature that ever was led through any of the various paths on earth, that a tractable youth, who was conducted at pleasure by anybody that approached him—it might be occasionally by persons delegated by no legitimate authority—was never guided for a moment by those upon whom, fully and without reservation, that most solemn and sacred obligation had been imposed, strengthened, morever, by every public and private, official and personal, moral, political and religious tie, which the civil polity of a long succession of ages could accumulate. Had the University been in fact, as in name, a kind nursing-mother to the most gifted of her sons, to one, who seemed, to those that knew him best,—
Heaven’s exile straying from the orb of light;