so much has been said to his discredit, would never have exposed him to a suspicion, much less to a direct imputation, of editorial knavery. It does not follow, however, that the _Life_ is disfigured by no statements to be fairly rated as deliberate misrepresentations. Resenting the calumnies, that have been poured on Hogg since his death; resenting more especially the malice of those, who would fain extort evidence to the biographer's infamy from what is mere evidence of one of Shelley's wildest and most unwholesome delusions; I wish I were in a position to declare the volumes altogether pure of falsehood. It would have been better for Hogg's character in his life's closing years, and far better for his posthumous fame, had he in his mature age written with candour and justice of the incidents that resulted in his academic disgrace, and of the individuals who only did their clear duty in bidding him and Shelley leave Oxford. But whilst lacking the courage to be truthful about matters even more discreditable to himself than to his friend, he wanted the highmindedness that would have enabled him to speak fairly of the Master and Fellows, whom he remembered to his last hour with a rancorous animosity that was singular in the man of usually even and placable disposition. The story of his academic disgrace was one of the very few subjects, on which the man of imperturbable temper and adamantine patience could not keep his temper. Whilst throwing off the papers for the _New Monthly_, Hogg surrendered himself the more completely to his animosity against the Oxford dons, because he could persuade himself that, in giving vent to his personal resentment, he was only vindicating the honour of his friend. The consequence was an account of Shelley's academic misadventure, so veined with misrepresentation and loaded with untruth, as to defeat the purpose for which it was written. It is needless to say that the Shelleyan enthusiasts have never protested against the egregious perversity and falseness of this portion of the biography. Attacking the book for its inaccuracy, in respect to those of its passages that are substantially honest, they have adopted as good history those of its pages that are distinctly untruthful. That Field Place saw nothing to censure in the faultiest part of the biographer's performance appears from the way, in which Lady Shelley reproduced some of its most glaring misrepresentations in her _Shelley's Memorials_. CHAPTER X. AT OXFORD: MICHAELMAS TERM, 1810.