Both descriptions were equally truthful and untruthful. The basis of truth in Byron's poetical narrative of his misspent youth is that he kept the girl at Brompton who used to ride and walk about London in boy's clothes, and that when he entertained three or four old college friends at Newstead, they talked a good deal of nonsense and drank rather more champagne than was good for them. The basis of truth in Shelley's narrative of his wretched boyhood is that he was often unhappy at school (_very_ unhappy at Brentford), and that being of a soft and girlish temperament when he was at Sion House, he sometimes fell a-weeping because the 'boys were so unkind to him.' The Shelleyan narrative is not historically exact to his doings and experiences in either of his two schools. At Brentford he was not remarkably insubordinate (as he was at Eton), and did nothing to give the faintest justificatory colour to his vaunt of having devoted himself to studies prohibited or discountenanced by the masters of the establishment. At Eton (where, though often unhappy, he was less given to crying than in his Brentford days), instead of neglecting the studies of the college, he attained to considerable excellence in them. Upon the whole, the weeping boy 'upon the glittering grass' bears more resemblance to the chicken-heart and milksop of Dr. Greenlaw's playground than to the unruly, fitfully riotous, and inordinately blasphemous young rascal, who was eliminated from Eton with the least possible disgrace, even as in later time he was expelled in an irregular way, and with no needless humiliation, from Oxford. And in consideration of this greater resemblance, the present writer has thought right to deal, in this chapter about the Brentford schoolboy, with the verses that, in Mrs. Shelley's opinion and Lady Shelley's opinion, are a faithful picture of the lad at Eton.