Hogg's Toryism--Shelley's Liberalism--In Hogg's Rooms--Shelley's Looks and Voice--Patron and Idolater--The Ways of Passing Time--Hogg's Reminiscences--Nocturnal Readings and Conversations--Country about Oxford--Pistol Practice--Playing with Paper Boats--Windmill and Plashy Meadow--The Horror of it--Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson--University Tattle and Laughter--Eccentric Inseparables--Pond under Shotover Hill--Pacing 'The High'--Dons' Civility to Shelley--His Incivility to Dons--Uninteresting Stones and Dull People--'Partly True and Partly False'--The Fiery Hun!--'My Dear Boy'--Shelley offers his Sister to Hogg in Marriage--Hogg entertains the Proposal--End of Term. Though I have spoken warmly of Hogg's general honesty, and resent the calumnies that have been rained down upon him in the grave, I must admit that Hogg's friendship was so injurious that it might almost be called disastrous to the Oxonian Shelley. Though the youth who had distinguished himself by unruliness at Eton, whose views of life had come to him chiefly from morbid romances, whose natural perversity disposed him to revolt against control of every kind, was far more likely to abuse the liberty and privileges of the academic course than to employ them to his advantage, the conditions are conceivable under which he would have passed through the University with honour--or at least without discredit. It depended chiefly on the friendships he should form immediately upon coming into residence at his college, whether, taking a new moral and intellectual 'departure' he would disappoint the evil promise of his Eton days, or whether he would persist in the perversities in which he had been encouraged by Dr. Lind. For his welfare in the University, it was needful that the young man, so sympathetic and fervid, but absolutely wanting in common sense and mental sobriety, should have for his especial friend a man devoid of moral levity, and should live in a set of young men who, together with tastes congenial to his own, possessed the steadiness of intellect and temper, calculated to restrain and correct the erratic forces of his peculiar nature;--young men who, by their example, rather than by their words, would dispose him to regard his University with pride, his College with affection, his tutors with loyalty. It was a great misfortune for Shelley that, on coming into residence, he found no such companions, and took for his chief associate,--indeed, his only familiar associate,--a young man, whose intellectual vigour and robustness were curiously allied with an intellectual levity and a cynical sprightliness, that rendered him a most baneful companion for a stripling of Shelley's equally fervid and wayward disposition.