In his later time at Eton, when he was distinguishing himself by contumacy and insolence to the masters of his school, his father was of course informed of his insubordination and other scholastic offences. Could his word be taken (which it may not be) on the matter, Shelley was twice expelled from Eton, and twice (at his father's entreaty) re-admitted to the school, before he was dismissed from it for the third and last time. It cannot be doubted the Atheist of College gave the masters good reasons for wishing him away from the school, and for requesting Mr. Shelley to remove him from an establishment that, fruitless of benefit to him, suffered not a little from his disorderliness. It is probable that the Squire of Field Place was aware of the maledictions poured upon him by the Etonian scapegrace. It is unlikely that the boy, so unruly and contumacious at school, was submissive and respectful to his father in the holidays. There is no evidence before the world that the lad received personal chastisement at his father's hands. But it is conceivable he was so corrected by the Member for New Shoreham, in days when fathers of unimpeachable humanity and affectionateness applied the bamboo and the birch to their sons in a way, that would now-a-days be justly stigmatized as barbarous and revolting. It is, however, certain that the essentially amiable, though rather choleric, squire, had much trouble to manage his heir, and that their inharmonious intercourse was attended with friction and collisions, that could not fail to make such a son regard his sire with suspicion and aversion. If he was familiar with the story of the Uckfield lunatic, either from the gossip of old servants, or from the free speech of that lunatic's nephew (old Sir Bysshe), what more likely and natural than for the Etonian scapegrace to think that his fate might resemble his great-great-uncle's fate,--that he might be set aside as a lunatic to his little brother's advantage in the arrangements of his family,--that his father was already looking about for a pretext and an occasion for sending him to a mad-house? But, it may be asked, was Peacock justified in going so far as to say of the poet, that 'the idea, that his father was continually on the watch for a pretext to lock him up, haunted him through life?' Was the delusion so absolutely unintermitting? Were there no times when the hideous fancy passed from his brain? No lucid intervals when he saw he had in this matter been the dupe of his own imagination? No times, moreover, when he forced himself back into the delusion by an effort of will and fancy, similar to those imaginative exercises in which Byron was so expert and curious an operator? In answer to these questions, it can only be said that there is no evidence of intermissions in the delusion, and that Peacock probably intended to say no more when he remarked that the morbid fancy, which certainly held the poet's mind in his later time, 'haunted him through life.'