As Lady Shelley's published book about her husband's father is still regarded as a work of authority, readers should examine this curious conglomerate of misrepresentations. (1) Instead of being exasperated by his son's avowal of atheism, Mr. Timothy Shelley, though naturally shocked and grieved by the incident, treated the eighteen-years-old youngster with affectionate consideration and tenderness, in respect to that serious offence. (2) Instead of excluding him from Field Place for that reason, he told him to go home quickly, when the boy's Atheism was his only reason for displeasure. (3) Mr. Timothy Shelley's vehement anger with the youngster was due to his contumacious refusal to comply with the reasonable requirement touching his intercourse with Hogg. (4) Lady Shelley speaks of 'the young controversialist,' as though the profession of atheism were one of the Liberal professions, and as though Mr. Timothy Shelley should have been grateful to the boy for embracing so honourable a vocation. (5) Instead of inflicting a bitter pang on his sensitively affectionate feelings, the sentence of exclusion from his boyhood's home merely caused Shelley a little irritation and a vast amount of amusement. (6) Instead of 'determining to _bear it_, for the sake of what he believed to be right and true,' Shelley resolved to treat the sentence of exclusion with contempt; to go to Field Place whenever it should please him to go there, 'to enter his father's dominions, preserving a quaker-like carelessness of opposition ... and turning a deaf ear to any declamatory objections,'--and he was as good as his word. The sentence of exclusion had been delivered barely a month, when (15th May, 1811) Shelley was back at Field Place; from which date till the middle of July, 1811, when he went to stay with his cousins at Radnorshire, he remained in Sussex staying alternately with his uncle Pilfold at Cuckfield, and with his mother and sisters in the home of his boyhood, from which he is said to have been so barbarously excluded. The sentence ceased to be operative as soon as the exile cared to disregard it. Keeping out of his father's way, so long as the 'old buck' was in his hottest 'rage' (to use the gentle Shelley's nice way of talking of his father and his father's displeasure), the exile of Poland Street went down to Field Place as soon as he thought life in the country would be pleasanter than life in London. The sentence of exclusion was from the first a mere _brutum fulmen_. It is absurd to speak of this exclusion as a real exclusion. At the worst it was nothing more than such an exclusion from his boyhood's home, as most undergraduates undergo, when they are 'rusticated' for one or two terms.