Hogg from this time forward spent a large part
of their days and nights together in common studies, walks and
conversations. It was their habit to pass the morning, each in his own
rooms, absorbed in private reading. At one o'clock they met and lunched,
and then started for long rambles in the country. Shelley frequently
carried pistols with him upon these occasions, and would stop to fix his
father's franks upon convenient trees and shoot at them. The practice of
pistol shooting, adopted so early in life, was afterwards one of his
favourite amusements in the company of Byron. Hogg says that in his use
of fire-arms he was extraordinarily careless. "How often have I lamented
that Nature, which so rarely bestows upon the world a creature endowed
with such marvellous talents, ungraciously rendered the gift less
precious by implanting a fatal taste for perilous recreations, and a
thoughtlessness in the pursuit of them, that often caused his existence
from one day to another to seem in itself miraculous." On their return
from these excursions the two friends, neither of whom cared for dining
in the College Hall, drank tea and supped together, Shelley's rooms
being generally chosen as the scene of their symposia.

These rooms are described as a perfect palace of confusion--chaos on
chaos heaped of chemical apparatus, books, electrical machines,
unfinished manuscripts, and furniture worn into holes by acids. It was
perilous to use the poet's drinking-vessels, less perchance a
seven-shilling piece half dissolved in aqua regia should lurk at the
bottom of the bowl. Handsome razors were used to cut the lids of wooden
boxes, and valuable books served to support lamps or crucibles; for in
his vehement precipitation Shelley always laid violent hands on what he
found convenient to the purpose of the moment. Here the friends talked
and read until late in the night. Their chief studies at this time were
in Locke and Hume and the French essayists. Shelley's bias toward
metaphysical speculation was beginning to assert itself. He read the
School Logic with avidity, and practised himself without intermission in
dialectical discussion. Hogg observes, what is confirmed by other
testimony, that in reasoning Shelley never lost sight of the essential
bearings of the topic in dispute, never condescended to personal or
captious arguments, and was Socratically bent on following the dialogue
wherever it might lead, without regard for consequences. P