has been used hitherto to an insignificant extent: yet it has worked wonders already. What will not an extraordinary combination of troughs of colossal magnitude, a well-arranged system of hundreds of metallic plates, effect?’ Nature, however, like the world, discourages a wild enthusiasm. ‘His chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer to promise nothing but disasters. He had blown himself up at Eton. He had inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared had seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids,’ and so on. Disgusted with these and other failures, he abandoned physics for metaphysics. He rushed head-long into the form of philosophy then popular. It is not likely that he ever read Locke; and it is easy to imagine the dismay with which the philosopher would have regarded so ‘heady and skittish’ a disciple: but he continually invoked Locke as an authority, and was really guided by the French expositions of him then popular. Hume, of course, was not without his influence. With such teachers only to control him, an excitable poet rushed in a moment to materialism, and thence to atheism. Deriving any instruction from the University, was, according to him, absurd; he wished to convert the University. He issued a kind of thesis, stating by way of interrogatory all the difficulties of the subject; called it the ‘necessity of atheism,’ and sent it to the professors, heads of houses, and several bishops. The theistic belief of his college was equal to the occasion. ‘It was a fine spring morning on Lady Day in the year 1811, when,’ says a fellow-student, ‘I went to Shelley’s rooms. He was absent; but before I had collected our books, he rushed in. He was terribly agitated. I anxiously inquired what had happened. “I am expelled.” He then explained that he had been summoned before the Master and some of the Fellows; that as he was unable to deny the authorship of the essay, he had been expelled and ordered to quit the college the next morning at latest.’ He had wished to be put on his trial more regularly, and stated to the Master that England was ‘a free country;’ but without effect. He was obliged to leave Oxford: his father was very angry; ‘if he had broken the Master’s windows, one could have understood it:’ but to be expelled for publishing a _book_ seemed an error incorrigible, because incomprehensible.