Shelley having caused so much trouble with his experimental excesses, it was decided that, to prevent them from turning their bedrooms into laboratories and setting fire to rotten timber, the boys should at least for awhile be forbidden to play at being chemical students. A book on chemistry, which Shelley had borrowed of Mr. Medwin, the Horsham attorney (Tom Medwin's father), being found in the lad's room, it was sent by his tutor to Mr. Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, who passed the volume on to its owner, saying in a note (referred to in the younger Medwin's _Life of Shelley_), 'I have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton.' As chemistry, thus forbidden in 1808, cannot be supposed to have been forbidden in the school when Old Walker was permitted to make the boys take an interest in the science, it is a fair inference that the prohibition resulted in some degree from annoyances, coming to the school through the lecturer's most interested auditor. Mad Shelley's electrical machine, and other scientific apparatus, would probably have been sent to Field Place, together with the volume on chemistry, had he not already deposited them for safe keeping in the hands of a certain white-headed gentleman, who will soon receive the attention he merits at the hands of the present writer. Those who knew Shelley best in his boyhood did not imagine at the time, that the 'prohibition of chemistry' would dispose him to desist from the forbidden pastime. Those who knew him best in later time concurred in thinking that the order to refrain from chemical inquiry and experiments would only quicken his enthusiasm for the proscribed amusement. 'Might not this extraordinary prohibition,' asks Mr. Medwin, speaking from his personal knowledge of his cousin in boyhood and manhood, 'have the more stimulated Shelley to engage in the pursuit?' In the same spirit, Mr. Rossetti remarks, with equal sagacity and justice. 'No doubt the great turn for chemical experiment which he developed at Eton, and which became his chief passion there, had as much to do with an impressible fancy, and with the fact that chemical practice was prohibited to the schoolboys in their chambers, as with scientific tendencies.'