It is needless to specify the pleasures to which Mr. Thornton Hunt points. The pleasures which may be bought, and often attract young men in their hours of idleness, and sometimes result in consequences permanently injurious to their health, are not so numerous as to make the reader doubtful as to the nature of the pleasures thus boldly indicated. But Mr. Thornton Hunt's statement has features which will dispose readers to question the sufficiency of his information. As Shelley never passed 'through the usual curriculum of a college life,' he can scarcely have passed through it 'in all its paths' (whatever that may mean):--but let that pass. It is enough that Mr. Thornton Hunt is unambiguous as to the class of the pleasures. It is not, however, so clear how those pleasures, which can only injure the mind through the body, should in Shelley's case have been so much less baneful to the body than the mind. As Mr. Thornton Hunt seems to have gained his facts from a loose talker or writer, it is only fair and charitable to the poet to suppose that his 'frank friend' got his facts from an altogether unreliable reporter. It may, of course, be that in a transient fit of rakishness Shelley was so unfortunate as to encounter mischance, which habitual rakes may be so lucky as to escape. But the abundant evidences to the point satisfy me that 'rakishness' was foreign to Shelley's general way of living at the University,--that, in respect to common kinds of dissipation, his habits accorded with the manners of Victorian much more closely than with the manners of Georgian Oxford. To pass from a matter about which Mr. Thornton Hunt might as well have been silent, to an affair of several incidents, which, though notorious, must be recorded precisely and fully, because they have never been narrated correctly;--the incidents that closed with Shelley's expulsion from University College, Oxford. Whilst rejecting, with his usual good sense, Hogg's apologetic and untruthful account of Shelley's motives and purpose in writing and publishing (for he did both) _The Necessity of Atheism_, Mr. William Rossetti remarks:-- 'In this case, as in others, the honestest and boldest course is also the safest: and we shall do well to understand once for all that Percy Shelley had as good a right to form and expound his opinions on theology as the Archbishop of Canterbury had to his. Certainly Shelley differed from the Archbishop, and from several other students of, and speculators on the subject, past and present; but, as there was no obligation on him to agree with all, or any of them, so there is nothing to be explained away or toned down when we find that in fact he dissented.'