might have been useful to the young poet, had he remained long enough at the University to complete the poem (which he began), and send it in to the judges. In one respect, the present writer may have described Shelley's academic life too favourably. Too much may have been said of the purity of the poet's personal tastes, and of his aversion to pleasures that are fascinating only to the sensual. If he has erred in this particular, the writer has not failed through ignorance of matters, making for another and less agreeable view of the undergraduate's ways of amusing himself at Oxford, but through a determination to say nothing on insufficient evidence to the discredit of a remarkable man, whose life affords too many occasions for necessary censure. When anything is needlessly blurted to Shelley's shame, the injurious statement is usually made by one of his idolaters, acting the proverbial part of a 'candid friend.' It is so in the case of what has been urged against the prevailing testimony to the purity and refinement of the Oxonian Shelley's personal habits and tastes. 'Accident,' says Mr. Thornton Hunt--one of Hogg's vituperators, and one of Shelley's idolaters--'has made me aware of facts which give me to understand that in passing through the usual curriculum of a college life in all its paths, Shelley did not go scatheless; but that, in tampering with venal pleasures, his health was seriously and not transiently injured. The effect was far greater on his mind than on his body.'