At Eton, as elsewhere, Shelley's uncompromising spirit brought him into inconvenient contact with a world of vulgar usage, while his lively fancy invested the commonplaces of reality with dark hues borrowed from his own imagination.

Mrs.Shelley says of him, "Tamed by affection, but unconquered by blows, what chance was there that Shelley should be happy at a public school ?" This sentence probably contains the pith of what he afterwards remembered of his own school life, and there is no doubt that a nature like his, at once loving and high-spirited, had much to suffer.

It was a mistake, however, to suppose that at Eton there were any serious blows to bear, or to assume that laws of love which might have led a spirit so gentle as Shelley's, were adapted to the common stuff of which the English boy is formed.

The latter mistake Shelley made continually throughout his youth; and only the advance of years tempered his passionate enthusiasm into a sober zeal for the improvement of mankind by rational methods.

We may also trace at this early epoch of his life that untamed intellectual ambition--that neglect of the immediate and detailed for the transcendental and universal--which was a marked characteristic of his genius, leading him to fly at the highest while he overleaped the facts of ordinary human life.