It seems to have been generally understood that Landor’s affair was a boyish escapade. A copious literature is engaged with the subject of Shelley’s expulsion. As the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his delightful book, the _Life of Shelley_, that poet’s career at Oxford was a typical one. There are in every generation youths like him, in unworldliness, wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of course, in genius. The divine spark has not touched them, but they, like Shelley, are still of the band whom the world has not tamed. As Mr. Hogg’s book is out of print, and rare, it would be worth while, did space permit, to reproduce some of his wonderfully life-like and truthful accounts of Oxford as she was in 1810. The University has changed in many ways, and in most ways for the better. Perhaps that old, indolent, and careless Oxford was better adapted to the life of such an almost unexampled genius as Shelley. When his Eton friends asked him whether he still meant to be ‘the Atheist,’ that is, the rebel he had been at school, he said, ‘No; the college authorities were civil, and left him alone.’ Let us remember this when the learned Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. Shairp, calls Shelley ‘an Atheist.’ Mr. Hogg sometimes complains that undergraduates were left too much alone. But who could have safely advised or securely guided Shelley? Undergraduates are now more closely looked after, as far as reading goes, than perhaps they like—certainly much more than Shelley would have liked. But when we turn from study to the conduct of life, is it not plain that no _official_ interference can be of real value? Friendship and confidence may, and often does, exist between tutors and pupils. There are tutors so happily gifted with sympathy, and with a kind of eternal youth of heart and intellect, that they become the friends of generation after generation of freshmen. This is fortunate; but who can wonder that middle-aged men, seeing the generations succeed and resemble each other, lose their powers of understanding, of directing, of aiding the young, who are thus cast at once on their own resources? One has occasionally heard clever men complain that they were neglected by their seniors, that their hearts and brains were full of perilous stuff, which no one helped them to unpack. And it is true that modern education, when it meets the impatience of youth, often produces an unhappy ferment in the minds of men. To put it shortly, clever students have to go through their age of _Sturm und Drang_, and they are sometimes disappointed when older people, their tutors, for example, do not help them to weather the storm. It is a tempest in which every one must steer for himself, after all; and Shelley ‘was borne darkly, fearfully afar,’ into unplumbed seas of thought and experience. When Mr. Hogg complains that his friend was too much left to himself to study and think as he pleased, let us remember that no one could have helped Shelley.