If the 'dons' were civil to Shelley, it must be admitted that he was less than civil to them. One would like to be able to say otherwise; but the evidence is conclusive that the undergraduate was uncivil to the 'dons' of his college, and to 'dons' not of his college, both in his bearing towards them, and his speech of them. On the very first evening of their acquaintance, Shelley withdrew from Hogg's rooms at 6.45 p.m., immediately 'after wine,' in order to attend a lecture on mineralogy,--leaving his entertainer with a promise to return to tea. An hour later he reappeared, chilly and disappointed. The evening was raw and cold, and the lecture had 'bored' him. He would never listen to another lecture by the dull lecturer. Coming close up to Hogg, and speaking in a shrill whisper, the young gentleman said with an arch look,-- 'I went away, indeed, before the lecture was finished. I stole away for it was so stupid, and I was so cold, that my teeth chattered. The Professor saw me, and appeared to be displeased. I thought I could have got out without being observed; but I struck my knee against a bench, and made a noise, and he looked at me. I am determined that he shall never see me again.' 'What did the man talk about?' Hogg asked. 'About stones! about stones!' answered the freshman (just then affecting to be an enthusiastic student of natural science). 'About stones!--stones, stones, stones!--nothing but stones!--and so drily. It was wonderfully tiresome--and stones are not interesting in themselves!' Discreditable to the youngster's intelligence and scientific knowledge, the story is highly discreditable to his breeding. Instead of being 'uninteresting things in themselves,' stones are things of extreme interest. If the lecture was dull, he was bound by academic etiquette and common social courtesy, to remain to the end of it. As the lecture was poorly attended, he was especially bound by politeness to hear it out to the last word. Leaving the lecture as he did, blundering out of the room with noise so as to attract the lecturer's attention, he was guilty of an extravagance of incivility and rudeness to one of the Professors[5] of his University. The freshman, who in the first week or ten days of his 'residence in college,' could behave in this way to the lecturer, who had bored him, was a freshman who on the slightest provocation would be 'an Atheist' at Oxford, in the same sense in which he had been an Atheist at Eton.