How came the Lord Chancellor to speak of the principles of _Queen Mab_ as ‘avowed at nineteen,’ when the book, though doubtless begun in the poet’s twentieth year, was mainly written as well as printed in his twenty-first year? The Lord Chancellor antedated the avowal at least by a fraction of a year, whilst giving Shelley’s full number of years at the delivery of the decree. Was the Lord Chancellor’s slight inaccuracy as to the date of _Queen Mab_, a slip for which he was solely accountable? He may have miscalculated the time between the date of the book’s title-page and the day on which he was delivering judgment. Or he may have considered that the author of a work printed in his twenty-first year might be assumed to have held and avowed, in his twentieth year, the opinions set forth in the book. It is however conceivable, and on the whole more probable, that he merely accepted a date given him in Shelley’s reply (written by himself) to the petition. There being no copy of that reply in existence, nor any record of its substance, to speak of its contents is to speak conjecturally. But in such a paper Shelley could hardly have omitted to refer to the time when he wrote the book, of which so much had been urged to his disadvantage by Mr. Westbrook’s counsel; and as he would see his interest in inducing the Lord Chancellor to regard it as a boyish performance, not to be accepted as evidence of his present opinions, it may be reasonably assumed that, in his reference to the important exhibit, Shelley put its composition as far back as possible. At Pisa, towards the close of his career, he wrote of the book as a thing proceeding from his pen when he was only eighteen years old. In the Court of Chancery he could scarcely ascribe it to so early a time of his existence as his nineteenth year, but he may be imagined to have assigned its composition to his twentieth year. To discover a copy of the lost reply would probably be to discover evidence, that in 1817, the poet assigned to his twentieth year the poem which in the summer of 1821 he represented himself to have written ‘at the age of eighteen.’ It is certain that the Chancellor was not referring to the _Necessity of Atheism_, when he referred to principles avowed by Shelley at the age of nineteen. The _Necessity of Atheism_ was notoriously published when the poet was _eighteen_; and it proclaimed no principles, on which he had acted in the particular _conduct_, set forth in the petition to which the Chancellor referred.