Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/145

Rh, almost uniformly unfortunate in his acquaintances. His life was truly one long and sorrowful disillusion; and in it not the least part was the discovery of how he had been deceived in his judgment of persons.

Hogg was his first example. Shelley became familiar with him at Oxford, and, not content with having him for a bosom friend, wished to make him his brother-in-law. At that time Shelley was in the first crude ferment of his intellectual life, eagerly absorbing the new knowledge which came to him from his indiscriminate reading, and disputing on all the usual topics with vehement and unwearied earnestness, insatiable curiosity, and the delight of a youth who has just made the discovery that he has a mind of his own. His thoughts and letters were mostly polemical; ideal elements of morality were growing up in him, and radical views of conduct getting a hold in his convictions. He was willful, precipitate, and heedless through inexperience; he was thrown the more upon himself, and given a violent turn toward rebellion, to which he was prone enough, by his expulsion from Oxford, and the senseless attempt of his family to make him suppress his mental and