sympathy would not be thrown away upon a young man free from all the
vices and frivolities of the time and place, whose crime was an
inquiring mind, and rashness in putting his views into print. Surely
the dangers which might assail a young man thus thrown on the world
and alienated from his family by this disgrace might have received
more consideration. This seems clear enough now, when Shelley's ideas
have been extolled even in as well as out of the pulpit.

So now we find Shelley expelled from Oxford and arrived in London in
March 1811, when only eighteen years of age, alone with Hogg to fight
the battle of life, with no previous experience of misfortune to give
ballast to his feelings, but with a brain surcharged with mysteriously
imbibed ideas of the woes of others and of the world--a dangerous age
and set of conditions for a youth to be thrown on his own resources.
Admission to his father's house was only to be accorded on the
condition of his giving up the society of Hogg; this condition,
imposed at the moment when Shelley considered himself indebted to Hogg
for life for the manner in which he stood by him in the Oxford ordeal,
was refused. Shelley looked out for lodgings without result, till a
wall paper representing a trellised vine apparently decided him. With
twenty pounds borrowed from his printer to leave Oxford, Shelley is
now settled in London, unaided by his father, a small present of money
sent by his mother being returned, as he could not comply with the
wishes which she expressed on the same occasion. From this time the
march of events or of fate is as relentless as in a Greek drama, for
already the needful woman had appeared in the person of Harriet
Westbrook, a schoolfellow of his sisters at their Clapham school.
During the previous January Shelley had made her acquaintance by
visiting her at her father's house, with an introduction and a present
from one of his sisters. There seems no reason to doubt that Shelley