The Press.
London, England, 1858-02-13 00:00:00

THE PRESS, FFBIItrAIIY 13,1858.

en-- --
Towards the west anti south they dipped considerably, and
verged to an ordinary stone-colour inside ; outside they
„ere rcd awl brown all the way round the circle. Hence
it „,,,,e, that when in previous months we had looked from
I • some of the bleached interior surfaces of points
•
on the northern brim, being seen through and over the
sonthent depression, gave us the erroneous idea of a
double crater ;an exterior ring-wall of brown, and an in-
side one of white, material; errors of perspective it now
ambeard.
Some short portions of the interior of the wall are pre-
cipitous rock, ten to twenty feet deep. But generally the
structure has so crumbled away during long ages of volcanic
idleneu, that it is now, like a baron's castle of a long past
feudal age, going to slow and certain ruin; falling down-
wards in a mass of rubbish that tends to fill up the central
lollow. All about the curving floor, my wife and Dun
Emiriguez wondered over the deep bed of fragments,
searching for the finest specimens of stilpher ; and, with
ph,,ttigrahic camera, I walked through and through the
the
crater more than a dozen times, in as many different three-
ti,,na, to take the several views,—completely disproving
thereby all alleged dangers of the " awful abyss," that one
tourist described looking into with fear; after he hail
" crawled " up on the outside to a high pinnacle from
whenoe he could safely make the survey.
The result of his observations was to confirm
him in his belief that the crater, if not cooling
and becoming extinct, was certainly stationary
in its volcanic action :

As far as we could make out, the ground is heated by
the steam, or at least has less temperature than the steam
which permeates it, and which indicated in the strongest
sent Wes only 150 deg.; while the boiling point of water
which we ascertained by careful experiment, in a deep
cleft on the western side of the crater, is 191 deg. 08 min.
There would seem therefore to be no " high-pressure " at
work, nor indeed any sensible difference in the effects on
the whole, since the day of Captain Was, nearly a century
since.
We part from Professor Smyth with reluc-
taw.. Scientific travellers are not always
agreeable writers, but the valuable matter con-
tained in this volume, and the peculiarly in-
teresting memoranda upon the natural pro-
ductions of the island, as well as the interest-
ing descriptions of the habits of the aborigines
of Teneriffe, render the book as agreeable to
the general reader as it is interesting to the
man of science. We must not conclude with-
out a word upon the valuable photo-stereo-
graphs with which the book is profusely illu-
strated. In themselves the views are ex-
tremely intetesting, for they present to us,
with exquisite accuracy, either some curious
geological or botanical phenomena, of which,
by a happy thought of Mr. Reeve, the pub-
lisher, we ore enabled to enjoy the effects
either of solidity or of distance, by the appli-
cation of a simple invention, the " Book
Stereoscope," which permits stereographs to
be bound up in a volume without detri-
ment to stereoscopic action. It is a bold and
novel attempt, which perfects materially a
work of this nature. The irmstmtions are as
beautiful as they are accurate, and the book,
both on account of its embellishments as well
as for the valuable facts it contains, and the
spirit of sound observation in which it is
written, is one in every respect calculated to
do credit both to author and publisher.

Shelley and his Writings. By Charles S.

Middleton. Two Vols. London : Newby.
IVE are glad that this biography has appeared,
although we shall not be able unreservedly
to commend the manner of its execution.
Sufficient misapprehension still exists in the
minds of many respectable persons as to the
conduct and character of the poet, to render
desirable a plain and continuous narrative of
the leading facts in his history divested of the
injurious colour which prejudice or enmity
cast upon them even long after be himself was
kyond their influence. Shelley's was one of
those natures which refuse to be classified. It
seems absurd to talk of him as " a man of
letters." or to associate with that fervid and
childlike temperament any of the ordinary
incidents of a literary career. There was so
much about him that admitted of misrepresen-
tation, and there was so little in his works
which could act as an effectual counterpoise to
it, that some more minute record than we
Previously possessed of his actions and dis-
position was clearly necessary to vindicate the
genuine nobleness of his heart, and operate as
some set-off against the few grave errors which
are undoubtedly to be laid to his charge. Of
all the writers that ever lived, Shelley is, on
the whole, the one who most perfectly exem-
plifies the abstract idea of a poet—who em-

bodies in their extreme all those attributes
which are vaguely, but not untruly, supposed
to constitute the poetical character. But his
lofty and unworldly mind, and the Ariel-like
spirituality of his writings, while they lift him
high amid the ranks of true singers, deprive
him in a proportionate degree of that fel-
low-feeling which guards from neglect the
temples of more earthly fame. Great writers
leave behind them, in the characters they have
created, a sort of shadowy army which fights
for their reputation even if there is not a shred
of it remaining, and does more effectual
service than the most ingenious biographer.
Whatever might be their feelings, we should
never think ill of the men who have touched
us to the core, who have made us laugh and
weep, who have given us Priam and Andro-
mache, Turnus and Dido, Cordelia, Falstaff,
Jeanie Deans, and Mr. Oldbuck, Mrs. Nickleby,
and Major Pendennis.
Such writers make us feel that we are their
kindred, and the sympathies they excite are
moral rather than intellectual. The Byrn-
' pathies which Shelley excites—apart, of
course, from his own personal character—are
intellectual, rather than moral ; and even he
himself, with all his goodness and kindness,
was too far removed both from the virtues and
the vices of his fellows, to waken the regard
of cursory acquaintances, or to escape the
limbo to which the world summarily consigns
" impracticable " men. There is nothing
about his creations which engages our affec-
tion ; they are too much " off their feet," and
live too much in a world of their own, to plead
with us for him who called them into being.
The excuse which Charles lamb invented for
the dramatists of the Restoration—that their
personages belong to an ideal region, in which
the common obligations of life do not exist—
might be applied with much more propriety
to the " Revolt of Islam," than to the
works of Congreve or Farquhar. But this
doctrine, while it may excuse the man, and
perhaps elevate the poet, places both on a
chilly eminence, where the air is too rarified
for the respiration of ordinary mortals. To
that " bright creature of the element," the
Muse of Shelley, that wanders through unap-
proachable solitudes amid the enchanted reve-
ries of a voluptuous Platonism, one feels in-
clined to address the idyllic invocation of a
modern poet :
Come down, 0 maid, from yonder mountain height:
What pleasure lives in height
In height and cold, the splendour of the hills?
Shelley was the only son of Sir Timothy
Shelley, of Castle Goring, and was born at
Field-place, Horsham, in 1792. The charac-
ter given by Mr. Middleton of his father and
mother would lead us to attribute to their
neglect all the perversity of character he ever
showed ; but very little seems to be really
ascertained either about them or about his
sisters, with whom be was brought up till
about eight or ten years old. After passing
four years at a school at Brentford, the master
of which was a sufficiently bad scholar to be
very severe on a verse of Ovid which was
shown up to him in a boy's exercise, and
where Shelley was narrowly prevented from
jumping out of a window in a fit, of somnambu-
lism, he was sent in his fifteenth year to Eton.
This, it is well known, was one of the most
miserable periods of his life ; and it is difficult
to understand how any parents could have had
the cruelty to send such a boy to school at all.
Mr. Middleton says :

He now became a victim of the fagging system, that
very amiable and enlightened custom which so pre-
eminently distinguishes the schools of our aristocracy.
It was not surprising that his proud and sensitive spirit
should rebel against this abominable practice ; and re-
fusing to fag at Eton, Mrs. Shelley tells us, he was treated
with revolting cruelty by masters and boys. This state-
ment, however. I am inclined to think rather too highly
coloured, for his early resistance to this species of oppres-
sion does not appear to have been the entire cause of the
treatment he received at Eaton.

The sneer against fagging is shallow, and is
not warranted by anything afterwards brought
forward. Whatever sufferings Shelley may
have undergone, we have no doubt that they
would have been much greater in a school
where fagging was not authorised. Mr. Mid-
dleton, who, we imagine, is not himself a
public-school man, does not see the obvious
truth that fagging is certain to exist in some
shape or other wherever boys are, and that it

163

is therefore better to prevent its abuses by
placing it under regulation. The " herd " who
teased and insulted Shelley appear to have
consisted of his own contemporaries—not of
the upper school. He never seems to have
taken kindly to the studies of the place, and
amused himself with chemical and astrono-
mical experiments and observations, and with
corresponding on the same subjects, and on
metaphysics, which seem to have occupied
him as early as the age of seventeen. On
leaving Eton he passed nearly a year at home,
where he read a great deal of trash, and began
a poem on the " Wandering Jew," two speci-
mens of which are given by Mr. Middleton.
They read like a weak imitation of Scott.
His six months at Oxford (in 1511), his long
walks, abstemious habits, scientific experi-
ments, and final expulsion, are perhaps the
best known portion of his career. He had
analysed " Hume's Essays," and circulated
copies privately—was asked by the authorities
of his college if he was author, and, on his
refusal to answer, was expelled. Mr. Hogg
suffered the same fate for remonstrating in his
behalf. The biographer, who ought to give us
something rational on the subject, has only the
following vague declamation to offer :

Moreover, he was a true idealist, impressed with deep,
religious fervour; with the faculty of veneration, strongly
developed, loving better to throw himself hack into the
past, and in the gardens of Academes to contemplate the
sublime vision of God and eternal Beatitude, through the
medium of his Divine Teacher, (than Ito accept, without
question, the dogmas before which ignorance and super-
stition might tremble, or which bigotry too frequently
seemed determined to enforce ; and here it will be seen,
on due reflection, that it was the very fact of his being
so grasping in his spiritual aspirations, that his imagine-
fion refused to clog her wing with the flimsy conceits
of schoolmen, or the mere conventionalisms of society,
when they represen'ed the Infinite in any way less than
the grandeur of his own conceptions.
We have now to see how a mind so richly, 'yet so pecu-
liarly endowed, was appreciated by his superiors.
His little pamphlet shortly fell into their hands, and it
was impossible they should understand it, fur it was con-
cent:fly the nature of God, and the questions started, as
subtle in their nature as those of Cyprian, in the " Majico
Prodigioso "of Calderon. They had no intellect to reply
to his interrogsticns, nor did they attempt it, as in com-
mon honesty they might have done, and had nothing to
offer, but the malignity of their own minds.

By his expulsion Shelley lost his first love—
his cousin, Aliso Harriet Grove—and was
turned adrift on London without resources,
though with every disposition towards the
amelioration of his species. His philanthropy
was so practical that he usually gave away all
be had, and once pawned his solar microscope
to raise money for a charitable purpose. How
he lived at all is a mystery, which is not dimi-
nished when we find Mr. Middleton referring
to this period the story of his making a bank
bill into a paper boat and sailing it on the
Serpentine.
His first marriage, with the ill-fated Harriet
Westbrook, occurred in the same year as his
expulsion from Oxford. After living at the
Lakes in Wales, in Ireland, in Wales again
(in 1812), in London again, where he wrote
" Queen Mab " (1813), they separated (in 1814)
by mutual consent. There is no truth what-
ever in the assertion that Shelley deserted his
wife. She took with her the child already born,
and remained with her own family till 1816,
when she committed suicide by drowning her-
self in a pond—not on account of her hus-
band's treatment, but apparently from the
mortification and annoyance she met with at
home. Shelley had shortly after their sepa-
, ration begun to live with Mary Godwin, whom
he subsequently married. The year 1814 was
partly occupied by their tour in France, which
came to an end for want of funds. This source
of anxiety was got over at the death, in the
next year, of Sir Bysshe Shelley (the poet's
grandfather), when an arrangement was made
that Percy should have 1,0001. a year. H•
passed 1816 in moving to and fro in England
and in a tour to Geneva, lasting several
months, during which he made the acquaint-
ance of Byron. On his return from this
journey occurred the suicide of his first wife,
and the refusal of the Chancellor to allow him
to have the custody of his children. The next
year was that of his residence at Marlow,
where he wrote the " Revolt of Islam " and a
pamphlet on Reform, which, from the extracts
given, seem to have been a more sober pro-
duction than might have been expected from
him. Mr. Middleton has met with a Mr.