At Eton, 'Old Walker' had an eager devourer of his words, a delighted witness of his experimental demonstrations, in Mad Shelley. The lectures had on Shelley all the effect they were designed to produce on intelligent lads. Producing on him all the effect desired by the Professor, they were also fruitful of results, that in the opinion of the Eton masters far exceeded the limits of wholesome interest. It is conceivable that, had Dr. Keate, and Mr. Bethell, and Mr. Hexter, known how the boy would be stirred and excited by the lectures, Old Walker would not have received permission to deliver them to the collegians, or Mad Shelley would not have been allowed to be present at their delivery. Like many other boys before and after his time, Mad Shelley was so taken by the lectures, that it is only a permissible figure of speech to say, he 'went mad' on natural science. Before Old Walker cleared out of Eton, the boy had become the owner of a solar microscope, and bought an electrical machine of Old Walker's assistant. In Mr. Hexter's house the boy (_ætat._ thirteen and fourteen) had shown more concern for English literature than for any other accessible means of pastime,--reading works of prose (as he had done at Brentford), learning by rote passages from the English poets, and composing childish dramas with the assistance of a fellow-pupil and fellow-fag of the same house, named Amos; amusing himself, in short, in accordance with his genuine and strongest intellectual taste and ambition. One of the happiest and most agreeable glimpses to be had of Mad Shelley in his earlier time of Eton, affords a view of the boy, running nimbly up and down the stairs of Mr. Hexter's house, and singing out cheerily the witches' song of _Macbeth_:-- 'Double, double, toil and trouble: Fire burn and cauldron bubble.' Of the plays composed by the two boys nothing is known at the present date, save that they were performed by the author before a third fag of their house, Matthews, who was the solitary witness of the performances, and, it may be hoped, an enthusiastically applausive one.