title to direct him authoritatively,--bade and entreated him to give no heed to such dangerous teachers. Having come into conflict with the Eton masters on the blue-flame question, and the natural right of every Eton boy to possess an electrical machine and use it at his pleasure for the humiliation of his tutor, Shelley was nearing the time when the unanimous voice of the forms (_minus_ the masters) proclaimed him 'The Atheist' of the school. Under the persecutions of the playground, which had goaded him out of his girlishness into thought and action, that revealed the masculine forces of his nature, Shelley was ceasing to be the Sion House 'faint heart' and 'milksop,' when Old Walker visited Eton. In the subsequent battle for freedom of scientific inquiry, the boy's combativeness became daily more and more apparent; his carelessness for his own skin and his contempt for Dr. Keate's rods more and more sublime, till Mad Shelley, ceasing to be everybody's butt, became a boy of pluck and merit to the whole school,--a possible martyr in the sacred cause of scholastic disorder,--a lad who cared not a fig for Keate or any of Keate's underlings. From the mad-dog of the Eton playing-grounds, he had risen to the proud position of The Eton Atheist. The girlish Shelley had for the moment become 'a boy,'--a very naughty boy! Let there be no misunderstanding about this rather sensational title. A boy might be The Eton Atheist, and at the same time be a sound and unwavering believer in every doctrine of the Thirty-nine Articles. The gods of Eton were only the masters of the school; the sceptics of Eton were nothing more terrible than those naughty boys who held these masters full cheap, and questioned their natural fitness for the authority given into their hands. The Atheist of Eton was the boy who surpassed all the other naughty boys in contempt for the masters, and not content with questioning their natural fitness for their official eminence, boldly and utterly denied it. No Etonian sceptic could question, no Etonian Atheist could deny the existence of gods who daily entered boys' names on flogging-bills. Dr. Keate's rods were no things to be ignored; the wielder of those rods was a person, whose existence could not be questioned. His character, however, was open to criticism, and the Lord High Atheist spoke his mind about it with freedom.