It is certain, that instead of having any natural aptitude for the practice, Shelley was unusually deficient in the qualities, requisite in a scientific experimentalist. A dreamer, a visionary, and an enthusiast, he wanted the nice touch, the fine perception of minute phenomena, the intellectual patience, the mental disposition for accuracy in the smallest details. It is certain that the man, who, even in his proper art, was curiously careless of verbal details, never had any sincere disposition for pursuits, in which nothing can be done without incessant attention to minutiæ,--for pursuits which repel the student, who does not delight in the painful vigilance and methodical exactness of scientific inquiry. Had he played with the microscope to the last hour of a long life, as he played with it fitfully for several years after leaving Eton, he would never for a single hour have been 'a worker' with it. He was singularly wanting in what Mr. Rossetti calls 'scientific tendencies.' On the other hand, it is no less manifest that in his earlier time a certain mental and moral perversity--a perversity by no means uncommon in young people, and only a few degrees less common in persons of mature age--gave him a keen appetite for fruit he was forbidden to pluck, and a distaste for whatever fruit he was required to enjoy. The majority of boys take to smoking (a very disagreeable pastime to beginners), even as Thomas Carlyle confessed he took to it,--'for the pure sin of it.' Just as the Chelsea sage began smoking because he was ordered not to smoke, the Etonian Shelley pursued chemistry because he was ordered not to pursue it. Had it not been for the needful prohibition of the pastime, that threw the school into disorder and threatened boarding-houses with destruction, the enthusiasm for science, for which Old Walker's lectures were in the first instance accountable, would soon have died out. Forbidden to play with his chemical apparatus and munitions, Shelley cared for no other pastime, and maintained that the pastime was a serious pursuit. Had the authorities of the school ordered every boy to study chemistry and astronomy, and put their ban on the pursuit of classical lore, Shelley would soon have declared natural science a profitless kind of busy idleness, and would have 'wrought linked-armour for his soul' out of Latin and Greek books. This perversity must be borne in mind by those who would take a true view of the Shelley of later times,--the Shelley who at Oxford soon ceased to care for the 'experimental studies' in which he was at liberty to waste his whole time, and cared especially for the sceptical writers whom he was admonished to avoid; the Shelley who, on coming from the university into the wider world, threw himself into the arms of the revolutionary doctrinaires (before he had given three weeks to the study of political science), because his natural advisers,--the persons with the strongest