At Oxford Shelley's literary activity was continued. In November, 1810, a volume of poems by Shelley, The Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, Edited by John Fitzvictor, was published. These poems were written originally in a serious vein, but, on Hogg's suggestion, a burlesque atmosphere was thrown about them by their ascription to the above-mentioned female, a mad washerwoman who had attempted to stab the king. Early in the following year appeared a second romance of the same general character as Zastrozzi, written probably at Eton, and entitled St. Irvyne.

About the date of the publication of St. Irvyne, when Shelley was at home spending his Christmas vacation, he became involved in various troubles. The latitude of his religious opinions came to the notice of his father, who suspected Hogg of corrupting Percy. In consequence Mr. Shelley, who was in London at the time, addressed a letter to his son which made the latter imagine himself, with boyish exaggeration, a victim of intolerance and a martyr for the truth. He writes to Hogg:

My father wrote to me, and I am now surrounded, environed by dangers to which compared the devils who besieged St. Anthony were all inefficient. They attack me for my detestable principles. I am reckoned an outcast; yet I defy them and laugh at their ineffectual efforts. . . . My father wished to withdraw me from college; I would not consent to it. There lowers a terrific tempest; but I stand, as it were, on a pharos, and smile exultingly at the beating of the billows below.

In a subsequent letter he tells how he attempted to enlighten his father, who admitted his son's principles, but when they were applied, silenced the young reasoner "with an equine argument, in effect with these words: 'I believe because I believe."" "My mother imagines me to be in the highroad to Pandemonium; she fancies I want to make

a deistical coterie of all my little sisters. How laughable!" His cousin, Harriet Grove, to whom he had been engaged, also turned against him. Happiness, it seemed to the young enthusiast, had vanished forever and all from the hateful spirit of intolerance.

Here I swear [he writes to Hogg on January 2], and as I break my oaths may Infinity, Eternity blast me, here I swear that I never will forgive intolerance. It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge; every moment shall be devoted to my object which I can spare; and let me hope that it will not be a blow which spends itself, and leaves the wretch at rest - but lasting, long revenge! I am convinced, too, that it is of great disservice to society that it encourages prejudices. which strike at the root of the dearest, the tenderest of its ties. Oh! how I wish I were the avenger! that it were mine to crush the demon, to hurl him to his native hell, never to rise again, and thus to establish forever perfect and universal toleration. I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in poetry. You shall see, you shall hear, how it has injured me. She is no longer mine! She abhors me as a skeptic, as what she was before. Oh, bigotry! When I pardon this last, this severest of thy persecutions, may heaven (if there be wrath in heaven) blast me!

Shelley's zeal for toleration showed itself also in matters beyond his own personal concerns. After his return to college, he gave practical testimony to his sympathy with the cause of free speech. He was one of the first subscribers to a fund in behalf of an Irish journalist whose attacks on the government had led to imprisonment. In connection. with this matter he addressed a letter to Leigh Hunt, editor of The Examiner, the mouthpiece of English radicalism, suggesting the formation of an organization of the friends of liberty.

But Shelley's disposition towards revolutionary views had its most important immediate outcome in a matter which

concerned himself. He had written a little pamphlet to show that there were no proofs of the existence of a deity. This he entitled The Necessity of Atheism; he added a preface, claiming that the desire for truth was the author's only motive for publishing, and expressing the hope that any reader who might be able to meet the arguments, would do So. The pamphlet was advertised for sale, and copies were sent to university dignitaries and other prominent personages. It was anonymous, but rumor ascribed the authorship to Shelley. He was summoned before the college authorities, refused either to acknowledge or deny the authorship, and was expelled. Hogg, of his own accord, went before the authorities to protest against Shelley's condemnation, and involved himself in the same penalty.

On the morning of March the twenty-sixth, 1811, the two friends quitted Oxford. They proceeded to London, took lodgings together, and for a short time continued their walking, talking, and reading, much as before their expulsion. This, however, could not last long; both were dependent on their parents, who, it need scarcely be said, did not regard their conduct with approval. Shelley's father commanded him to break off all communications with Hogg, to return home, and place himself under the care and instruction of such a person as his father might select. Shelley refused to comply. In a few weeks Hogg had to leave for York, where he was to study law, and his companion was left in comparative loneliness. Two of Shelley's sisters were at school in the suburbs, at Clapham; there Shelley frequently visited them, and, young though they were, attempted to indoctrinate them with some of his peculiar views. Among their schoolmates was a certain Harriet Westbrook, not yet sixteen, and endowed with marked personal attractions. She had regular features, an exquisite complexion, symmetrical form, and graceful movements.

Her father was a retired coffee-house keeper, well-to-do in the world. Her mother seems to have been an incapable sort of person; and an elder sister, Eliza, almost twice Harriet's age, exercised over her the care and influence which naturally belong to a mother. Shelley had already, earlier in the year, become acquainted with the younger sister, and now the acquaintance ripened into intimacy. Harriet did not share in the horror with which the other girls at Mrs. Fenning's school looked upon the atheist, and she was, in consequence, exposed to some petty persecutions. Her elder sister, also, showed sympathy with Shelley and interest in his doctrines, and he became a not infrequent visitor at their home in London. It is not improbable that matrimonial views in regard to Harriet lay at the bottom of Eliza's encouragement of Shelley. "Her father," too, as Shelley notices, "is civil to me, very strangely." But as far as can be judged, ideas of love and marriage were not consciously present in Shelley's mind. Harriet was to him an interesting disciple, a young soul to be brought into that illumination which he himself enjoyed.

Meanwhile, through the intervention of a maternal uncle and the good offices of the Duke of Norfolk, who was a sort of patron and friend to Timothy Shelley, an accommodation was effected between father and son. The latter was to receive an allowance of £200 a year, and was left to do as he pleased with respect to place of abode. He returned to Field Place, but found the surroundings uncongenial. "I am a perfect hermit," he says in a letter, "not a being to speak with! I sometimes exchange a word with my mother on the subject of the weather, upon which she is irresistibly eloquent; otherwise all is deep silence! I wander about this place, walking all over the grounds, with no particular object in view." Again: "It is most true that the mass of mankind are Christians only in name; their religion has no

reality. Certain members of my family are no more Christians than Epicurus himself was; the discanonisation of this saint of theirs is impossible until something more worthy of devotion is pointed out; but where eyes are shut, nothing can be seen. They would ask, Are we wrong to regard the opinion of the world? what would compensate us for the loss of it? Good heavens, what a question! Is it not to be answered by a word? So I have little of their confidence." His eldest sister Elizabeth, whom he had hoped to win over to his peculiar views, and, in his daydreams, had designed for Hogg, cared more for amusements and worldly advantage than for truth and philosophy. She received with contempt or aversion her brother's teachings as to the evils of legal marriage and the folly of substituting any merely external tie for the true love that binds kindred hearts together.

As a partial substitute for companionship with a sympathetic spirit, Shelley maintained a close correspondence, not merely with Hogg, but also with a Miss Hitchener, a schoolmistress whom he had lately met. Miss Hitchener was some thirty years old, angular and swarthy, but of advanced views and deeply interested in those questions, philosophical and political, for which the young enthusiast most cared. She seemed to Shelley an ideal spirit, with that complete understanding of his point of view and that perfect sympathy for which his heart yearned. Their correspondence treated of the widest and profoundest questions, the existence of God, immortality, political and social equality. To Miss Eliza Westbrook, also, and her sister he from time to time addressed letters, though not finding the former wholly to his mind.

About the beginning of July, Shelley went to Wales to pass some weeks with a cousin. One motive for this journey may have been the wish to meet the Westbrooks, who intended