I proposed, as they had closed the casements, and as the
shutters were on the outside, to fire a volley. It was thought a
good trick, and accordingly I went into my bedroom and fired." Mr.
Leeds very superfluously complained to the President. Landor adopted
the worst possible line of defence, and so the University and this
poet parted company.
It seems to have been generally understood that Landor's affair was a
boyish escapade. A copious literature is engaged with the subject of
Shelley's expulsion. As the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his
delightful book, the Life of Shelley, that poet's career at Oxford
was a typical one. There are in every generation youths like him, in
unworldliness, wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of
course, in genius. The divine spark has not touched them, but they,
like Shelley, are still of the band whom the world has not tamed. As
Mr. Hogg's book is out of print, and rare, it would be worth while,
did space permit, to reproduce some of his wonderfully life-like and
truthful accounts of Oxford as she was in 1810. The University has
changed in many ways, and in most ways for the better. Perhaps that
old, indolent, and careless Oxford was better adapted to the life of
such an almost unexampled genius as Shelley. When his Eton friends
asked him whether he still meant to be "the Atheist," that is, the
rebel he had been at school, he said, "No; the college authorities
were civil, and left him alone.
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