If he thought his father capable of such self-sacrifice for his boy's happiness, Shelley must have thought his father an admirably good parent. If he thought his father capable of such barbarity to his own offspring, Shelley must have deemed his father a superlatively cruel and wicked parent. To have believed his father capable of the parental self-sacrifice and the parental cruelty, Shelley must in the same moment of time have regarded his father as one of the very best and one of the very worst parents. It is not in the power of human sanity or human madness to think thus differently of the same person at the same moment. If Shelley really believed his father was watching for an opportunity to shut him up in a madhouse, he was fibbing when he wrote to Leigh Hunt, that his father would probably soon retire from parliament in his favour. If Shelley believed what he wrote to Leigh Hunt, he was fibbing when he talked to Hogg and others of his cruel father's malignant purpose to shut him up in a lunatic asylum. Strange creature though he was, it is difficult to believe even of Shelley that, whilst seeing his father's goodness, he could be so malignantly wicked to do his utmost to persuade his friends of his father's inordinate badness. Perhaps it is even more difficult to imagine, strange being though he was, that whilst thinking his father an execrably bad parent, Shelley would be so perverse as to invent the story, which went to prove his father an extraordinarily good one. To escape from this tangle of difficulties, from this dilemma of _four_ horns, readers are at liberty to assume that the Oxonian Shelley believed no tittle of either of the marvellous stories. Dismissing the assumption that the youngster wrote to Leigh Hunt in good faith and simple honesty, they may take it as proved that, in bragging about the seat he would have in parliament as soon as he should have taken his degree, the undergraduate was fibbing, in order that the newspaper editor should form something more than an adequate notion of his correspondent's importance. They may also take it as proved, that the undergraduate was no more sincere in talking about his wicked father's design to lock him up in a madhouse, than in writing that his father would probably retire from parliament in his favour. The time, doubtless, came when Shelley believed his worst fictions to his father's discredit, even as tellers of untruths usually come in course of time to believe the fabrications which they persist in repeating steadily and earnestly:--even as 'the nobleman, who recently languished in captivity at Portland,' has doubtless succeeded in persuading himself that he is the veritable Sir Roger Tichborne.