entering his room in a state of somnambulism. His eyes were open, and he advanced with slow steps towards the window, which was thrown up, it being the height of summer.

Medwin sprung out of bed, seized him by the arm, and waked him, ignorant of the danger of thus awakening the somnambulist. He was excessively agitated, and after being led back to his couch Medwin sat by him for some time, a witness to the severe erethism of his nerves, which the sudden shock had produced.

This is the only instance of sleep-walking at Sion House, and we are told that even this involuntary transgression brought down upon him a brutal and most unjust punishment. His very dreams seem to have exhibited a remarkable feature. He would first relapse into a state of lethargy and abstraction, and when the access was over, would arouse himself to a supernatural energy. His eyes flashed, his lips quivered, his voice was tremulous with emotion, a sort of ecstasy would come over him, and he talked more like an angelic spirit than a human being.*

* Medwin's Life of Shelley, vol. i. page 34.

Shelley appears to have made no friends at Sion House, if we except his Cousin Medwin, to whom, we are told, he used often to pour out his sorrows with observations far beyond his years, "which," says Medwin, "according to his after-ideas, seemed to have sprung from an antenatal state." At length, however, the young dreamer was removed from the uncongenial atmosphere of Sion House, a place for which he ever afterwards entertained so much disgust, that he would never allow himself to allude to it.

CHAPTER III.

Shelley arrives at Eton-His solitary habits-Is known as Mad Shelley-The Fagging System-Ill treatment of the poet-His conscious superiority-His boyish hilarity-Eton dramatics.

IN 1807, when Shelley was in his fifteenth year, we find him at Eton. Here he appears to have been placed under Mr. Hexter, who professed to be a teacher of writing, though it is said that the boys under his roof made a much greater proficiency with their knives and forks than they did with their pens in the writing academy. We are told that he was one of those extra masters, some of whom resided at the College, and holding an amphibious rank between the tutor and the dame, were allowed to take boarders.

The life Shelley led here was very much a repetition of his life at Brentford. An old Etonian says, "for years and years, and long before I knew that Shelley the boy was Shelley the poet and friend of Byron, he dwelt in my memory as one of those strange and unearthly compounds, which sometimes, though rarely, appear in the human form divine."

The same writer adds, "either from natural delicacy of frame, or from possessing a mind which in boyhood busied itself in grasping thoughts beyond his age, probably from something of both, he shunned or despised the customary games and exercises of youth. This made him with other boys a byword and a jest. He was known as Mad Shelley, and many a cruel torture was practised upon him for his moody and singular exclusiveness."

He now became a victim of the fagging system, that very amiable and enlightened custom which so preeminently distinguishes the schools of our aristocracy. It was not surprising that his proud and sensitive spirit should rebel against this abominable practice; and refusing to fag at Eton, Mrs. Shelley tells us, he was treated

with revolting cruelty by masters and boys. This statement, however, I am inclined to think rather too highly coloured, for his early resistance to this species of oppression does not appear to have been the entire cause of the treatment he received at Eton.

The child of genius rarely finds much sympathy among his schoolmates; and in the case of Shelley, they took every opportunity to annoy and insult him. Singly, however, they dared not attack him, "for," says the writer above quoted, "there was a method in his madness which taught repentance; but the herd unite against the stricken, and boys, like men, envy the strongest, and trample upon the weak."

We are told that poor Shelley's anguish and excitement sometimes bordered upon the sublime. Conscious of his own superiority, of being the reverse of what the many deemed him; stung by the injustice of imputed madness-by the cruelty, if he were mad, of taunting the afflicted-his rage became boundless. Like Tasso's gaoler, his heartless tyrants all but raised up the demon which they said was in him; and adds the same writer, "I have seen him sur

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