preserved for us a record of his friend’s early days, which is incomparable for the vividness of its portraiture.  The pages which narrate Shelley’s course of life at Oxford have all the charm of a romance.  No novel indeed is half so delightful as that picture, at once affectionate and satirical, tender and humorous, extravagant and delicately shaded, of the student life enjoyed together for a few short months by the inseparable friends.  To make extracts from a masterpiece of such consummate workmanship is almost painful.  Future biographers of Shelley, writing on a scale adequate to the greatness of their subject, will be content to lay their pens down for a season at this point, and let Hogg tell the tale in his own wayward but inimitable fashion.  I must confine myself to a few quotations and a barren abstract, referring my readers to the ever-memorable pages 48—­286 of Hogg’s first volume, for the life that cannot be transferred to these.

“At the commencement of Michaelmas term,” says this biographer, “that is, at the end of October, in the year 1810, I happened one day to sit next to a freshman at dinner; it was his first appearance in hall.  His figure was slight, and his aspect remarkably youthful, even at our table, where all were very young.  He seemed thoughtful and absent.  He ate little, and had no acquaintance with any one.”  The two young men began a conversation, which turned upon the respective merits of German and Italian poetry, a subject they neither of them knew anything about.  After dinner it was continued in Hogg’s rooms, where Shelley soon led the talk to his favourite topic of science.  “As I felt, in truth, but a slight interest in the subject of his conversation, I had leisure to examine, and I may add, to admire, the appearance of my very extraordinary guest.  It was a sum of many contradictions.  His figure was slight and fragile, and yet his bones and joints were large and strong.  He was tall, but he stooped so much, that he seemed of a low stature.  His clothes were expensive, and made according to the most approved mode of the day; but they were tumbled, rumpled, unbrushed.  His gestures were abrupt, and sometimes violent, occasionally even awkward, yet more frequently gentle and graceful.  His complexion was delicate and almost feminine, of the purest red and white; yet he was tanned and freckled by exposure to the sun, having passed the autumn, as he said, in shooting.  His features, his whole face, and particularly his head, were, in fact, unusually small; yet the last appeared of a remarkable bulk, for his hair was long and bushy, and in fits of absence, and in the agonies (if I may use the word) of anxious thought, he often rubbed it fiercely with his hands, or passed his fingers quickly through his locks unconsciously, so that it was singularly wild and rough.  In times when it was the mode to imitate stage-coachmen as closely as possible in costume, and when the hair was invariably cropped, like that of our soldiers,