Percy Bysshe Shelley | Page 5

that it is distinguished
in the elder branch by one baronetcy dating from 1611, and by a second
in the younger dating from 1806. In the latter year the poet's
grandfather received this honour through the influence of his friend the
Duke of Norfolk. Mr. Timothy Shelley was born in the year 1753, and
in 1791 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Charles Pilford, Esquire, a
lady of great beauty, and endowed with fair intellectual ability, though
not of a literary temperament. The first child of this marriage was the
poet, named Bysshe in compliment to his grandfather, the then living
head of the family, and Percy because of some remote connexion with
the ducal house of Northumberland. Four daughters, Elizabeth, Mary,
Hellen, and Margaret, and one son, John, who died in the year 1866,
were the subsequent issue of Mr. Timothy Shelley's marriage. In the
year 1815, upon the death of his father, he succeeded to the baronetcy,
which passed, after his own death, to his grandson, the present Sir
Percy Florence Shelley, as the poet's only surviving son.
Before quitting, once and for all, the arid region of genealogy, it may
be worth mentioning that Sir Bysshe Shelley by his second marriage
with Miss Elizabeth Jane Sydney Perry, heiress of Penshurst, became
the father of five children, the eldest son of whom assumed the name of
Shelley-Sidney, received a baronetcy, and left a son, Philip Charles
Sidney, who was created Lord De l'Isle and Dudley. Such details are
not without a certain value, inasmuch as they prove that the poet, who
won for his ancient and honourable house a fame far more illustrious
than titles can confer, was sprung from a man of no small personal
force and worldly greatness. Sir Bysshe Shelley owed his position in
society, the wealth he accumulated, and the honours he transmitted to
two families, wholly and entirely to his own exertions. Though he bore
a name already distinguished in the annals of the English landed gentry,
he had to make his own fortune under conditions of some difficulty. He

was born in North America, and began life, it is said, as a quack doctor.
There is also a legend of his having made a first marriage with a person
of obscure birth in America. Yet such was the charm of his address, the
beauty of his person, the dignity of his bearing, and the vigour of his
will, that he succeeded in winning the hands and fortunes of two
English heiresses; and, having begun the world with nothing, he left it
at the age of seventy-four, bequeathing 300,000 pounds in the English
Funds, together with estates worth 20,000 pounds a year to his
descendents.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was therefore born in the purple of the English
squirearchy; but never assuredly did the old tale of the swan hatched
with the hen's brood of ducklings receive a more emphatic illustration
than in this case. Gifted with the untameable individuality of genius,
and bent on piercing to the very truth beneath all shams and fictions
woven by society and ancient usage, he was driven by the
circumstances of his birth and his surroundings into an exaggerated
warfare with the world's opinion. His too frequent tirades against:--
The Queen of Slaves, The hood-winked Angel of the blind and dead,
Custom,--
owed much of their asperity to the early influences brought to bear
upon him by relatives who prized their position in society, their wealth,
and the observance of conventional decencies, above all other things.
Mr. Timothy Shelley was in no sense of the word a bad man; but he
was everything which the poet's father ought not to have been. As
member for the borough of Shoreham, he voted blindly with his party;
and that party looked to nothing beyond the interests of the gentry and
the pleasure of the Duke of Norfolk. His philosophy was limited to a
superficial imitation of Lord Chesterfield, whose style he pretended to
affect in his familiar correspondence, though his letters show that he
lacked the rudiments alike of logic and of grammar. His religious
opinions might be summed up in Clough's epigram:--
At church on Sunday to attend Will serve to keep the world your friend.

His morality in like manner was purely conventional, as may be
gathered from his telling his eldest son that he would never pardon a
mesalliance, but would provide for as many illegitimate children as he
chose to have. For the rest, he appears to have been a fairly good
landlord, and a not unkind father, sociable and hospitable, somewhat
vain and occasionally odd in manner, but qualified for passing muster
with the country gentlemen around him. In the capacity to understand a
nature which deviated from the ordinary type so remarkably as
Shelley's, he was