Though it took the outer world by surprise, the immediate result of the publication of Hogg's two volumes was less surprising to the literary coteries, and no matter of surprise whatever to the few members of those coteries, who, knowing that Hogg was a robust enemy of shams, knew that no biographer would satisfy Field Place, which should fail to accord with the straight-nosed pictures, and with the notion that Shelley was a being of stainless purity and angelic holiness. If, in writing the _Life_, Hogg's first duty was to be thoughtful for the sensibilities of Field Place, his book must indeed be declared a bad one. Instead of giving readers the Shelley indicated by the frontispiece of the first volume, or the Shelley who, under auspicious circumstances might have been the Saviour of the World, or a Shelley who might have sobered down into a pheasant-shooting squire and Chairman of Quarter-Sessions, the biographer makes us acquainted with the wayward, freakish, impulsive, scarcely sane, and ever restless Shelley of the poet's early manhood,--the Shelley, whose great wit was divided from madness by a strangely thin partition; the Shelley, whose earnestness was too often associated with perversity, whose winning candour was curiously allied with secretiveness, whose impulsive benevolence was perplexingly linked with indifference to the feelings and rights of particular individuals; the Shelley, whose several amiable and generous traits were attended by qualities that were neither beneficent nor agreeable. Showing that this whimsical Shelley was a frequent utterer of untruths that were altogether or partly referable to delusions, Hogg also shows by evidence of the most conclusive kind that this perplexing Shelley could also utter untruths, knowing them to be untruths--was capable of telling fibs to escape a trivial inconvenience,--was capable of writing false and wheedling letters to get money, and of admitting with a singular, if not absolutely unique, shamelessness, that he had told a lie, or meant to tell a lie for a very slight reason.