'My grandfather, Sir Bysshe, partly; but principally my friend, Dr. Lind, at Eton. When anything goes wrong at Field Place, my father does nothing but swear all day long afterwards. Whenever I have gone with my father to visit Sir Bysshe, he always received him with a tremendous oath, and continued to heap curses upon his head so long as he remained in the room.'
Ever ready, though he was, to give evidence to his father's discredit, the undergraduate did not venture to charge his father with retorting Sir Bysshe's maledictions. Whilst Mr. Timothy Shelley appears only to have sworn after a bad fashion of the period, the first baronet of Castle Goring exceeded the licence of blasphemy accorded to gentlemen by a custom, more honoured in the breach than the observance.
It remains to be seen how the Shelleyan enthusiasts will deal with the record of Shelley's habit of cursing his father, when the public shall have been educated to approve every act of the poet's life; but at present they glide lightly over the ugly business in memoirs for the general reader, glossing it with suggestions of wilful misstatement or unconscious exaggeration on the part of the poet's earliest biographer. Even Mr. Forman forbears to hint that Shelley's resemblance to the Saviour of the World is heightened by the poet's behaviour to his father. In the coteries, however, where the Shelleyan apologists speak with less caution, these cursing bouts are sometimes referred to for evidence that, even in his boyhood, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ was a person of infinite jest and subtle humour. These apologists must bear with a writer who sees much to condemn, and nothing to admire, in such exhibitions of unfilial rancour and profanity. There are jokes and jokes;--those that can be enjoyed, those that can be tolerated, and those that are absolutely intolerable. The joke of a boy cursing his own father for the amusement of his schoolfellows is one of the intolerable kind. The reader may be safely left to select a fitter word than 'humourist' for the designation of the young gentleman, who amused himself and his friends in so revolting a manner.
Mr. Walter S. Halliday, by the way, must have forgotten all about these cursing-bouts, when he wrote to Lady Shelley, 'He' (_i.e._, the poet at Eton) 'had great moral courage and feared nothing, but what was base, false, and low.' Surely it is base and low for a boy to curse his own father for the pure fun of the thing.