Getting her fanciful notions of the matter from her husband's lips, Mrs. Shelley would have us believe that repugnance to fagging was the offence which brought him so often to the block, and rendered him alike unpopular with masters and boys. It is even averred that to put down fagging he organized a conspiracy of the junior Etonians against the barbarous practice. That no such conspiracy was begotten and fostered by Shelley is certain; for the old Etonians, of whom Medwin and Middleton certainly (Peacock and Hogg almost certainly) made inquiries about the matter, had never heard anything of a movement which could not have failed to come to their knowledge, had it ever been an incident of scholastic politics in their time. The truth underlying these fictions is that Shelley, like most junior boys, conceived a hatred of 'fagging,' suffered much from it, and having, unlike most junior boys, the rashness to declare the hatred, paid the penalty of his rashness, in being cuffed, licked, and silenced in various painful and exasperating ways. This seems to be the whole of the case, which he magnified in later time into a far greater affair. To Peacock, he used to speak of the cruelties practised upon him by senior boys at Eton, with a show of abhorrence only surpassed by his display of indignation and disgust at the monstrous barbarities done him by Lord Chancellor Eldon. In still later time he doubtless spoke even more passionately to his wife of the fires of Etonian persecution. Men sometimes say strange things to their wives; and, in certain moods, wives are even quicker to believe the strange things, than in other moods to suspect untruth in the commonplace things told them by their lords. After brooding for twelve years or more over the sorrows and wrongs he endured at Eton, the poet believed all he imagined about them.