half-an-hour later return to them with heightened gaiety after flogging a batch of gentlemanly young culprits. If he has not been strangely maligned by history and tradition, he used to stand for the hour together over the penal block with his right shoulder well thrown back, and his right arm moving like a piece of machinery. He is said to have flogged eighty boys on a single morning, throwing his whole force into every stripe, smiling grimly as he went on in the path of duty, and finally retiring to his breakfast with an air of serene complacence pervading the visage, that bore so striking a resemblance to the visage of a bull-dog. Prominence is here given to these matters out of deference to those of the Shelleyan enthusiasts who, like Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley, insist that harsh and ferocious schoolmasters are to be held accountable for whatever was slightly amiss in the poet, before he shone forth a faultless creature. Arising in no way from deficiency of materials, which, save in respect to one or two matters, are superabundant for the biographer's purpose, the chief difficulty in describing Shelley's course at Eton is the difficulty of discriminating between the trustworthy and delusive materials, and especially of separating the threads of pure fact from the threads of pure fiction used in about equal proportion in the manufacture of statements that, without the exercise of cautious and nice discernment, might be accepted as wholly true or altogether devoid of evidential value. For instance, in dealing with the statements by Mr. Packe, touching Shelley's career at Eton--statements to which Lady Shelley accords her unqualified credence and conclusive 'imprimatur'--it is by no means easy to separate the threads of truth from the threads of fable. 'Among my latest recollections of Shelley's life at Eton,' says Mr. Packe, at the end of his letter, 'is the publication of _Zastrozzi_, for which, I think, he received 40_l._ With part of the proceeds he gave a most magnificent banquet to eight of his friends, among whom I was included.'