During his stay at the public school, Shelley seems to have resided successively at two different houses. Getting his information from old Etonians, who had known the author of _Laon and Cythna_ at Eton, Mr. Middleton certifies that the future poet boarded, in 1807, at the house of Mr. Hexter, the writing-master, 'one of those extra masters, some of whom resided at the College, and, holding an amphibious rank between the tutor and the dame, were allowed to take boarders.' Subsequently he is found in the house of Mr. Bethell, the tutor whom Mr. Packe (possibly with no more justice than generosity) described half-a-century later as 'one of the dullest men in the establishment.' What Mr. Packe's qualifications were for passing judgment in this style on one of his former preceptors does not appear; but the solitary epistle, which gives him a place in these pages, would not warrant a confident opinion that brightness was Mr. Packe's distinguishing characteristic. Fortunately, for school-masters, evidence given to their discredit by former pupils is never regarded as evidence of the highest quality by persons of discretion and judicial fairness. Possibly Mr. Packe was as wrong about Mr. Bethell's intellect, as he was about the date of the publication of _Zastrozzi_. But an idle word to the defamation of the Eton tutor, with whom Shelley came into conflict, was no word for Lady Shelley to withhold from the world. It has long been the practice of the Shelleyan enthusiasts to think and speak the worst of every one with whom the poet had a difference,--to blacken every reputation that could be suspected of lowering the lustre of the poet, who under auspicious circumstances 'might have been "the Saviour of the World."' That Shelley, on the girlish side of his nature, was no boy 'to take kindly to fagging,' and on the masculine side of his nature was precisely the boy to detest a system under which he might be licked with a bamboo or a leather strap for hard-boiling an egg which he had been told to boil lightly, no one is likely to question. But though it is certain he disliked being made to fag, and more than probable that he showed this dislike in ways to be resented, not only by the proprietors of fags, but also by the most infantile of Etonian conservatives, readers are under no obligation to accept for truth all the fine and melodramatic accounts of the efforts made, and sufferings endured by the poet, in order to put an end to so revolting a system of domestic tyranny.