Yet we are told that all would have gone well with him at Oxford, had the Master and Fellows of the University only left him alone. Because religious uniformity was maintained with the least possible interference with the liberty of individuals, it would be a mistake to imagine it was not maintained effectually. Of late the fashion has arisen to speak of the religious forms, that were used for the preservation of this uniformity, as vain and idle forms. A moment's consideration will satisfy the fair and judicial reader that this fashion is an unjust one. Surely the forms were not vain and idle, that excluded from the Universities the young men of our non-conforming families; that yearly drove to other and inferior seminaries some three or four hundred young men of our fairly prosperous families, who, but for those forms, would have sought their higher education at Oxford and Cambridge. To assume that those forms were less influential within the Universities than in families having no connection with the Established Church, is to assume that English Dissenters surpassed English Churchmen greatly in truthfulness. Doubtless the Oxonians of Georgian England comprised a small percentage of undergraduates who were extreme free-thinkers, and a more considerable percentage of young men, who, after subscribing the Articles in levity, and with an imperfect knowledge of their contents, passed their academic terms in frivolity and dissoluteness. But it cannot be doubted that the religious requirements and observances of the University operated as an efficacious discipline on the majority of the students. The same requirements and observances were also influential on every undergraduate, whatever his secret sentiments and his manner of living, in reminding him that the University was a school for members of the Church of England and for no other persons, that as a member of the University he was bound to live in apparent conformity to the National Church, and that he would forfeit his right to remain in the University by repudiating the doctrines of the Church. In Shelley's academic time, every undergraduate knew that by publishing a work to discredit the fundamental doctrines of Christianity he would render himself liable to banishment from the University, and that the authorities of his college would be constrained by their official obligations to take prompt action for his punishment, and in case he persisted in his flagrant heterodoxy to expel him. It is certain that Shelley's view of his academic obligations and responsibilities differed widely from Mr. Rossetti's erroneous view of them. That he published _The Necessity of Atheism_ anonymously, that he made a secret of his authorship of the work, that he declined to answer 'yea' or 'nay' to the inquiry whether he wrote the tract, are sufficient testimony that he was alive to the nature and consequences of the offence of which he had been guilty. Evidence under Shelley's own hand has already