it is a forbidden thing at Eton." During his life at
University College, Oxford, his delight in chemical experiments continued.

His chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer to premise
nothing but disasters. He had blown himself up at Eton. He had
inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared had
seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he
should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his
furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids--more than one
hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of
combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the floor
had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid in a
crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by rents,
for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of
truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot.

The same eagerness of discovery is shown in his passion for kite-flying as
a boy:

He was fond of flying kites, and at Field Place made an electrical
one, an idea borrowed from Franklin, in order to draw lightning
from The clouds--fire from Heaven, like a new Prometheus.

And his generous dream of bringing science to the service of humanity is
revealed in his reflection:

What a comfort it would be to the poor at all times, and especially
in winter, if we could be masters of caloric, and could at will
furnish them with a constant supply!

Shelley's many-sided zeal in the pursuit of truth naturally led him early
to invade theology. From his Eton days, he used to enter into
controversies by letter with learned divines. Medwin declares that he saw
one such correspondence in which Shelley engaged in argument with a bishop
"under the assumed name of a woman." It must have been in a somewhat
similar mood that "one Sunday after we had been to Rowland Hill's chapel,
and were dining together in the city, he wrote to him under an assumed
name, proposing to preach to his congregation."

Certainly, Shelley loved mystification scarcely less than he loved truth
itself. He was a romanticist as well as a philosopher, and the reading in
his childhood of novels like _Zofloya the Moor_--a work as wild,
apparently, as anything Cyril Tourneur ever wrote--excited his imagination
to impossible flights of adventure. Few of us have the endurance to study
the effects of this ghostly readin