Shelley felt his expulsion acutely.  At Oxford he had enjoyed the opportunities of private reading which the University afforded in those days of sleepy studies and innocuous examinations.  He delighted in the security of his “oak,” and above all things he found pleasure in the society of his one chosen friend.  He was now obliged to exchange these good things for the tumult and discomfort of London.  His father, after clumsily attempting compromises, had forbidden his return to Field Place.  The whole fabric of his former life was broken up.  The last hope of renewing his engagement with his cousin had to be abandoned.  His pecuniary position was precarious, and in a short time he was destined to lose the one friend who had so generously shared his fate.  Yet the notion of recovering his position as a student in one of our great Universities, of softening his father’s indignation, or of ameliorating his present circumstances by the least concession, never seems to have occurred to him.  He had suffered in the cause of truth and liberty, and he willingly accepted his martyrdom for conscience’ sake.

CHAPTER 3.

Life in London and first marriage.

It is of some importance at this point to trace the growth and analyse the substance of Shelley’s atheistical opinions.  The cardinal characteristic of his nature was an implacable antagonism to shams and conventions, which passed too easily into impatient rejection of established forms as worse than useless.  Born in the stronghold of squirearchical prejudices, nursed amid the trivial platitudes that then passed in England for philosophy, his keen spirit flew to the opposite pole of thought with a recoil that carried him at first to inconsiderate negation.  His passionate love of liberty, his loathing for intolerance, his impatience of control for self and others, and his vivid logical sincerity, combined to make him the Quixotic champion of extreme opinions.  He was too fearless to be wise, too precipitate to suspend his judgment, too convinced of the paramount importance of iconoclasm, to mature his views in silence.  With the unbounded audacity of youth, he hoped to take the fortresses of “Anarch Custom” by storm at the first assault.  His favourite ideal was the vision of a youth, Laon or Lionel, whose eloquence had power to break the bonds of despotism, as the sun thaws ice upon an April morning.  It was enough, he thought, to hurl the glove of defiance boldly at the tyrant’s face—­to sow the “Necessity of Atheism” broadcast on the bench of Bishops, and to depict incest in his poetry, not because he wished to defend it, but because society must learn to face the most abhorrent problems with impartiality.  Gifted with a touch as unerring as Ithuriel’s spear for the unmasking of hypocrisy, he strove to lay bare the very substance of the soul beneath the crust of dogma and the froth of traditional