294 CRITICAL STUDIES doubts and difficulties, instead of attempting to clear up and solve them ! Non ragionam di lor, ?na guarda e passu / 2. The relations between Shelley and his father. Mr. S. writes, p. 44 : "I agree with Shelley's last and best biographer, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, in his condemnation of the poet's behaviour as a son." But read some of his other sentences bearing on this subject: "We only know that in his early boyhood Shelley loved his father so much as to have shown unusual emotion during his illness on one occasion, but that, while at Eton, he [Shelley] had already become possessed by a dark suspicion concerning him [his father]. This is proved by the episode of Dr. Lind's visit during his fever. Then and afterwards he expected monstrous treatment at his [father's] hands, although the elder gentleman was nothing worse than a muddle-headed squire." In fact, Shelley believed that his father intended to put him in a madhouse (p. 17). Again, p. 5: "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. . . . His morality, in like manner, was purely conventional, as may be gathered from his telling his eldest son [Shelley] that he would never pardon a mesailiance, but that he would provide for as many illegitimate children as he chose to have." Yet young Oxford accounts Mr. Timothy in no sense of the word a bad man ; but Shelley must have felt as outraged and disgusted as was Marius in Les Mis'erables at a similar hint from his well-to-do relative of tancien regime. After the expulsion from Oxford, the father forbade his return home, and cut
