the poet’s memory, and it may reasonably be conjectured that Shelley’s peculiar sympathy for snakes was due to the dim recollection of his childhood’s favourite.  Some of the games he invented to please his sisters were grotesque, and some both perilous and terrifying.  “We dressed ourselves in strange costumes to personate spirits or fiends, and Bysshe would take a fire-stove and fill it with some inflammable liquid, and carry it flaming into the kitchen and to the back door.”  Shelley often took his sisters for long country rambles over hedge and fence, carrying them when the difficulties of the ground or their fatigue required it.  At this time “his figure was slight and beautiful,—­his hands were models, and his feet are treading the earth again in one of his race; his eyes too have descended in their wild fixed beauty to the same person.  As a child, I have heard that his skin was like snow, and bright ringlets covered his head.”  Here is a little picture which brings the boy vividly before our eyes:  “Bysshe ordered clothes according to his own fancy at Eton, and the beautifully fitting silk pantaloons, as he stood as almost all men and boys do, with their coat-tails near the fire, excited my silent though excessive admiration.”

When he was ten years of age, Shelley went to school at Sion house, Brentford, an academy kept by Dr. Greenlaw, and frequented by the sons of London tradesmen, who proved but uncongenial companions to his gentle spirit.  It is fortunate for posterity that one of his biographers, his second cousin Captain Medwin, was his schoolfellow at Sion House; for to his recollections we owe some details of great value.  Medwin tells us that Shelley learned the classic languages almost by intuition, while he seemed to be spending his time in dreaming, now watching the clouds as they sailed across the school-room window, and now scribbling sketches of fir-trees and cedars in memory of Field Place.  At this time he was subject to sleep-walking, and, if we may credit this biographer, he often lost himself in reveries not far removed from trance.  His favourite amusement was novel-reading; and to the many “blue books” from the Minerva press devoured by him in his boyhood, we may ascribe the style and tone of his first compositions.  For physical sports he showed no inclination.  “He passed among his school-fellows as a strange and unsocial being; for when a holiday relieved us from our tasks, and the other boys were engaged in such sports as the narrow limits of our prison-court allowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace backwards and forwards—­I think I see him now—­along the southern wall, indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the chaotic elements, if I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful a world.”

Two of Shelley’s most important biographical compositions undoubtedly refer to this period of his boyhood.  The first is the passage in the Prelude to “Laon and Cythna” which describes his suffering among the unsympathetic inmates of a school:—­