authority. He resisted the fagging-system. He
spoke contemptuously of physical prowess. He disliked anything that he
was obliged to do, and he rushed eagerly into whatever was forbidden.

Finally, when he was sent to University College, Oxford, he broke all
bounds. At a time when Tory England was aghast over the French
Revolution and its results, Shelley talked of liberty and equality on
all occasions. He made friends with an uncouth but able fellow student,
who bore the remarkable name of Thomas Jefferson Hogg--a name that
seems rampant with republicanism--and very soon he got himself expelled
from the university for publishing a little tract of an infidel
character called "A Defense of Atheism."

His expulsion for such a cause naturally shocked his father. It
probably disturbed Shelley himself; but, after all, it gave him some
satisfaction to be a martyr for the cause of free speech. He went to
London with his friend Hogg, and took lodgings there. He read
omnivorously--Hogg says as much as sixteen hours a day. He would walk
through the most crowded streets poring over a volume, while holding
another under one arm.

His mind was full of fancies. He had begun what was afterward called
"his passion for reforming everything." He despised most of the laws of
England. He thought its Parliament ridiculous. He hated its religion.
He was particularly opposed to marriage. This last fact gives some
point to the circumstances which almost immediately confronted him.

Shelley was now about nineteen years old--an age at which most English
boys are emerging from the public schools, and are still in the
hobbledehoy stage of their formation. In a way, he was quite far from
boyish; yet in his knowledge of life he was little more than a mere
child. He knew nothing thoroughly--much less the ways of men and women.
He had no visible means of existence except a small allowance from his
father. His four sisters, who were at a boarding-school on Clapham
Common, used to save their pin-money and send it to their gifted
brother so that he might not actually starve. These sisters he used to
call upon from time to time, and through them he made the acquaintance
of a sixteen-year-old girl named Harriet Westbrook.

Harriet Westbrook was the daughter of a black-visaged keeper of a
coffee-house in Mount Street, called "Jew Westbrook," partly because of
his complexion, and partly because of his ability to retain what he had
made. He was, indeed,