In like manner the conversations, which Mr. MacCarthy derides as 'invented conversations,' were of course given as nothing more than exhibitions of certain matters, and the kind of matters on which he remembered himself to have talked with the poet, and of the way in which they talked together to the best of his recollection after a lapse of more than twenty years. To the lawyer, familiar with questions of evidence, it never occurred that 'the conversations' would be read in any other way. To the humourist (and that Hogg was a racy humourist is admitted even by his enemies) the bare imagination that any supremely matter-of-fact mortal would read 'the conversations,' as one peruses a short-hand reporter's notes of a legal cross-examination, would have been provocative of vehement laughter. The questions for the critic to ask about these conversations are, Do they faithfully exhibit the kind of subjects on which the two friends chatted?--the ways in which the talk flowed?--the sentiments and manner of the young poet? Are they, in fact, faithful exhibitions of what Hogg remembered, or believed himself to remember, after a lapse of more than twenty years, of the talk he and Shelley had with one another when they were undergraduates? No impartial and fairly intelligent reader of the Papers will hesitate to answer these questions in the affirmative. However defective, the Papers on _Shelley at Oxford_ were greatly beneficial to the reputation of the poet, whose writings had found few readers outside the literary coteries during his life, whose name was still associated in the minds of the majority of educated Englishmen with atheism, conjugal faithlessness, and dangerous politics, rather than with the highest poetry. Written lightly and circulated widely, the sketches, dealing only with the Oxonian Shelley, created an impression that the undergraduate had been treated harshly by the authorities of his college, and left readers in a mood to discover that he had been too severely punished for the indiscretions of later stages of his career. Henceforth, instead of being confined to the coteries, the desire for larger knowledge of the poet's personal story found a voice in general society.