ABSTRACT
Bysshe Shelley was born in America in 1731, where, according to Medwin, the poet's cousin, he began life as a quack doctor. Timothy Shelley, the poet's father, born in 1753, so that he was sixty-two when he succeeded to the baronetcy and the large fortune which Sir Bysshe had increased by saving. Little is known of Shelley's mother. She was a Miss Pilfold of Effingham in Surrey, and married Timothy in 1791. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the eldest child of the marriage, was born on August 4, 1792. At ten he was sent a boarder to Sion House Academy at Isleworth, where he found his second cousin and future biographer, Thomas Medwin, who was some years older than himself. The 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' was written when Shelley had become a Platonist; and we may well believe, with Professor Dowden, that it was Plato who purified his mind of those superstitions which wrought upon his nerves rather than upon his imagination.
