What does Mr. Garnett mean by giving Hogg as his authority for saying that _The Necessity of Atheism_ was a squib, when Hogg is at pains to say the tract was no such thing? Hogg writes lightly and seriously by turns of the tract, as he does of other matters of the poet's story. He speaks of the pamphlet as 'a small pill that worked powerfully.' To minimize the importance of the work, for which he was even more accountable than Shelley; to make the least of the serious offence, touching his own character no less hurtfully than Shelley's reputation, Hogg calls it a 'little pamphlet,' 'a general issue,' 'a compendious allegation in order to put the whole case in proof,' 'a formal mode of saying, you affirm so-and-so, then prove it,' 'a little syllabus,' 'an innocent and insignificant thesis propounded for the delectation of lovers of logomachy,' a tract that 'was never offered for sale.' In this style Hogg speaks lightly of the work, that was the central incident of the painful business, about which he felt too acutely and personally to his last hour, to be able to speak of it truthfully. The whole affair was one of the few subjects on which the otherwise substantially honest biographer was untruthful. Consequently, had he called the tract a squib, in some sentence at discord with his other statements about the pamphlet, Mr. Garnett would not have been justified in fathering his own discovery on an authority, so unworthy of perfect credit on this particular subject. But Hogg nowhere calls the tract a squib. On the contrary, he guards against any such misconstruction and misinterpretation of his lighter remarks, and is at pains to say that, so far as Shelley was concerned, the pamphlet was an altogether serious performance. 'In describing briefly the nature of Shelley's epistolary contentions,' Hogg says, 'the recollection of his youth, his zeal, his activity, and particularly of many individual peculiarities, may have tempted me to speak sometimes with a certain levity, notwithstanding the solemn importance of the topics respecting which they were frequently maintained. The impression that they were conducted on his part, or considered by him, with frivolity, or any unseemly lightness, would, however, be most erroneous; his whole frame of mind was grave, earnest, and anxious, and his deportment was reverential, with an edification reaching beyond the age--an age wanting in reverence.'