SHELDON, Gilbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, was born at Staunton, Staffordshire, on 19th July, 1598. Admitted to Trinity college, Oxford, in 1613, he became M.A. in 1620, B.D. in 1628, and D.D. in 1634. In 1622 he was chosen a fellow of All-Souls, and having been ordained became chaplain to Lord Coventry, keeper of the great seal, by whose influence he was recommended to Charles I., and obtained a prebend in Gloucester cathedral. In May, 1633, he was presented by his majesty to the vicarage of Hackney, and he held in succession the rectory of Ickford in the county of Buckingham, and of Newington in Oxfordshire. In 1635 Sheldon was chosen warden of All-Souls college. During the civil war he zealously espoused the royal cause, and being clerk of the closet was one of the chaplains sent to attend the royal commissioners at the treaty of Uxbridge in 1644. In 1647 he was ejected summarily from his wardenship, and cast with other royalists into prison. On regaining his freedom he retired to Snelston in Derbyshire, and busied himself in collecting and sending funds to the exiled Charles II. At the Restoration his services were not forgotten, and he first became dean of the chapel royal, and then bishop of London. He was also master of the Savoy; and at his residence took place, in 1661, the famous Savoy conference between the episcopalian and presbyterian divines. In 1663, on the death of Juxon, Sheldon was promoted to the see of Canterbury, and he succeeded Lord Clarendon as chancellor of the university of Oxford in 1667, holding the office only for two years. He died at Lambeth, 9th November, 1677. Sheldon was a man of great probity—firm to his convictions, and zealous in canning them out. He was a fortunate churchman, but not a spoiled one. He remained at Lambeth during the great plague, and his pious and active courage was of signal benefit in the distressing panic. He spent large funds in repairing and beautifying the episcopal palaces of London and Canterbury. He also built at his own expense the large hall where the public university meetings at Oxford are held, and which is named after him, the Sheldonian theatre.—J. E.
SHELLEY, Mary, wife of the poet and daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, was born in 1798. Shelley's early intimacy with her father brought them into contact, and the young poet naturally made a deep impression on the mind of an imaginative girl. After Shelley's separation from his first wife, Mary Godwin, then a girl of sixteen, and nurtured in the peculiar social philosophy of her parents, united her lot to his, although marriage was in the meantime impossible. They lived together in this way on the continent and in England until 1816, when, after the suicide of the first Mrs. Shelley, they were legally married. In 1818 they quitted England, which Shelley was destined never to revisit. It was in 1816, during a visit of Lord Byron to his friends, the Shelleys, then living in a cottage on the banks of the lake of Geneva, that the party, after the perusal of some German ghost stories, agreed to imitate them. The result was Byron's prose fragment, The Vampire, and a much more memorable one, Mrs. Shelley's romance of "Frankenstein." "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus," was published in 1818. It was at once extensively popular; and from the wild originality of its chief character, the Monster, fashioned by human hands and mysteriously vivified, it will always retain a place of its own in English fiction. By her husband's unfortunate death, Mrs. Shelley was left a widow at the age of twenty-four in a foreign country, regarded with dislike by Shelley's family, and having to support a child, the present baronet. She returned to England in 1823, and published in that year her novel of "Valperga," followed in 1824 by "The Last Man;" in 1830 by "Perkin Warbeck;" in 1835 by "Lodore;" and in 1837 by "Falkner"—scarcely any of them fictions of mark. Besides contributing Italian and Spanish biographies to Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia, she published in 1844 "Rambles in Germany and Italy." She had edited in 1824 Shelley's Posthumous Poems; and in 1839 she edited a complete collection of his Poetical Works, adding interesting biographical notes of the circumstances of their composition, and which breathe the warmest affection for her husband and devotion to his memory. In the following year she edited selections from his "Essays, Letters," &c. In 1841 her son succeeded to the baronetcy on the death of his grandfather, and brighter days seemed in store for her. She contemplated a biography of her husband, but symptoms of alarming illness supervened, and the congenial task was never executed. She died in London on the 21st February, 1851. There is a notice of her with some extracts from her journals and letters in the Shelley Memorials, from authentic sources, edited by Lady Shelley, London, 1859.—F. E.
SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe, one of the greatest—in the estimation of many critics the greatest—of the cluster of poets who adorned the earlier years of this century, was born in Sussex in 1792, the son of a wealthy baronet of good family. From his home, where he was known as a wild and fantastic boy, he was sent to Eton. During the period of an unhappy residence there, he inaugurated with meek determination his rebellion against the fashions of the world. In 1808 he went to Oxford, where he plunged into the study of chemistry, and was continually on the verge of blowing himself up by his experiments. A spasmodic course of metaphysics led him to a crude materialism, and the publication of a tractate, entitled "The Necessity of Atheism," was followed by his expulsion from the university. Soon after, he printed "Queen Mab," which combined with an unfortunate marriage to complete his alienation from his family. Like Byron, Shelley had a first love in a Miss Harriet Grove, a young lady who admired his boyish genius and read his Rosicrucian novel, but would not listen to his sighs. She married and was happy. Shelley in his unhappiness met another Harriet, a school friend of his sister's; her name and affection were sufficient attractions; they ran off together to Gretna, and were launched, a pair of children, on the world. "We have such good neighbours," wrote the child-wife from the Lakes, "they allow Percy and me to play in the garden." We know little more about the marriage except that it was foolish. Miss Westbrook, a lively girl of sixteen, was evidently not a fitting companion for the impetuous youth of nineteen in the very "Sturm und Drang" of metaphysics, politics, and poetry. After three years they separated by mutual consent. Her suicide, which occurred some years afterwards, from causes apart from Shelley's conduct, so affected his mind as temporarily to unhinge it. After some time, divided between a residence at the English lakes and in Ireland, the poet made the acquaintance of the Godwins. His union with Mary, their daughter, was the most fortunate event of his life. Herself an authoress of no mean note, with tastes, aspirations, and sentiments akin to his own, she was endowed with all those exceptional qualities fitted to harmonize with an exceptional nature. Meanwhile fresh troubles gathered around Shelley; his fearless promulgation of opinions subversive of the foundations of church and state, and his abnormal practice, aroused an opposition which did not confine itself to denunciations. His writings were proscribed, his very charities were received with suspicion. The children of his first marriage were wrested from him by a decree of the Lord-chancellor Eldon; and he was under constant apprehension that the threat of a similar judgment on his other and favourite son might be put in execution. In 1818 he left England for Italy. There he built up the most enduring monuments of his genius, and lived, with her who was to him something better than his genius, a life that was in itself a poem.
Shelley's life accounts for much of his antagonism to life, and the counter antagonism which it called forth. Inspired from boyhood with the spirit of opposition to circumstances and beliefs uncongenial to his nature, he is the most conspicuous instance of an impulsive character in the annals of biography. Byron lived by fits; Shelley lived in a mood of passion. In his best moments it was high feeling, and not principle, which guided him. His excellencies arose from an innate longing after perfection, rather than an idea of obligation. He did not live like Wordsworth under the law of duty. "Unchartered freedom" never tired him, and he did not feel "chance-desires" as a weight. His acts, whether for good or evil, were all acts of impulse. His strength arose from its strength, and his weakness from a want of those faculties which are required to regulate and control it. It has been said that there is a political philosophy and a poetical philosophy, but no poetical politics. Shelley's poetry is only an apparent exception to this; the political part of it is utterly unreal. Inspired with a passion for reforming mankind, he had no store of experience to guide him on the way. Impatient of half measures, he wished to make a tabula rasa of the world and build another on its ruins. "Had Shelley been in France," writes some one, "he might have walked like the fair-haired republican, Saint-Just, on the path to freedom over seas of blood;" and Hazlitt about the same time gives the following abusive though graphic
