that his friend did not like bread, and could scarcely
appreciate the joke when they laughed at him for devouring two or three
pounds of dry bread in the streets.

Very early in life he began to have decided opinions upon religious
topics; and for some of his so-called atheistic tendencies, embodied in
his writings, he was expelled from Oxford at the age of seventeen,
without a word of friendly remonstrance upon the part of the
authorities, or any attempt whatever to counteract the errors which he
had imbibed from the reading of French philosophy. We can scarcely
believe it at this day, but it was true.

"At seventeen," says Mrs. Shelley, "fragile in health and frame, of
the purest habits in morals, full of devoted generosity and
universal kindness, glowing with ardor to attain wisdom, resolved
at every personal sacrifice to do right, burning with a desire for
affection and sympathy, he was treated as a reprobate, cast forth
as a criminal."

Even his father cast him off on account of his impious opinions, and
added his curse; and had he been in the way of procuring a _lettre de
cachet_, like Mirabeau's father, he would certainly have sent him to
Newgate and kept him there. As it was, all his friends deserted him, and
he lived in lodgings in London, in a very irregular manner, for some
time. Even his cousin Harriet Grove, with whom he had been in love in
his boyish way for a long time, gave him up, and soon after married
another. The affair was not a serious one upon the part of either; but
it cost Shelley some tears at the time. He soon consoled himself,
however, with a schoolmate of his sisters whom he sometimes met when he
went to visit them. Harriet Westbrook was empowered by his sisters to
convey to Percy such sums of money as they could gather for him; for his
father had refused to assist him, and he was in absolute want at this
time. She appeared to Shelley in the guise of a ministering angel, and
his imagination at once took fire. She was a comely, pleasing, amiable,
ordinary girl, who felt herself oppressed because obliged to go to
school, and excited Shelley's sympathy by appearing unhappy. He soon
became entangled with her and her sister, who was older, and who is
accused of furthering the intrigue out of ambition, thinking that the
son of a baronet must be a great match. He writes to a friend in May,
1811:--

"You will perhaps see me before you can answer this; perhaps