Michaelmas Term was still young, when the same sceptical auditor listened with more interest than credulity to Shelley's account of the way in which he was saved from the madhouse, to which he would have been consigned by his inhuman father, had it not been for Dr. Lind's timely and intrepid action. Before the Term had grown old, Mr. Hogg had heard much, of which he believed little, to the discredit of the worthy, though curiously pompous gentleman, who retained the confidence of the New Shoreham electors, without possessing his eldest son's good opinion. To say that Shelley told his whole heart and mind to his fellow-collegian during this season of their closest and most cordial intimacy, would be saying too much of a young man, whose candour was less real than apparent:--of the rash and seemingly reckless speaker who, resembling Byron in the freedom with which he talked of his private affairs to slight acquaintances and the whole world, resembled him also in having reserves from those to whom he was most communicative, even at the moments when he seemed most incapable of secresy or any other kind of self-restraint. Hogg, however, may well have imagined that nothing was withheld from him by the freshman, who, talking to him copiously of half-a-hundred matters he had better have kept to himself, submitted his letters from Field Place to so recent an acquaintance, letters from his father, and letters (containing specimens of her poetry) from his sister. Expressing great admiration of the young lady's verse and prose, Mr. Hogg was vastly tickled by the peculiarities of Mr. Timothy Shelley's epistles, which he turned to ridicule with much piquant sprightliness, and to the lively gratification of their writer's son.