Here the friends talked and read until late in the night.  Their chief studies at this time were in Locke and Hume and the French essayists.  Shelley’s bias toward metaphysical speculation was beginning to assert itself.  He read the School Logic with avidity, and practised himself without intermission in dialectical discussion.  Hogg observes, what is confirmed by other testimony, that in reasoning Shelley never lost sight of the essential bearings of the topic in dispute, never condescended to personal or captious arguments, and was Socratically bent on following the dialogue wherever it might lead, without regard for consequences.  Plato was another of their favourite authors; but Hogg expressly tells us that they only approached the divine philosopher through the medium of translations.  It was not until a later period that Shelley studied his dialogues in the original:  but the substance of them, seen through Mdme. Dacier’s version, acted powerfully on the poet’s sympathetic intellect.  In fact, although at the time he had adopted the conclusions of materialism, he was at heart all through his life an idealist.  Therefore the mixture of the poet and the sage in Plato fascinated him.  The doctrine of anamnesis, which offers so strange a vista to speculative reverie, by its suggestion of an earlier existence in which our knowledge was acquired, took a strong hold upon his imagination; he would stop in the streets to gaze wistfully at babies, wondering whether their newly imprisoned souls were not replete with the wisdom stored up in a previous life.

In the acquisition of knowledge he was then as ever unrelaxing.  “No student ever read more assiduously.  He was to be found, book in hand, at all hours; reading in season and out of season; at table, in bed, and especially during a walk; not only in the quiet country, and in retired paths; not only at Oxford, in the public walks, and High Street, but in the most crowded thoroughfares of London.  Nor was he less absorbed by the volume that was open before him, in Cheapside, in Cranbourne Alley, or in Bond Street, than in a lonely lane, or a secluded library.  Sometimes a vulgar fellow would attempt to insult or annoy the eccentric student in passing.  Shelley always avoided the malignant interruption by stepping aside with his vast and quiet agility.”  And again:—­“I never beheld eyes that devoured the pages more voraciously than his; I am convinced that two-thirds of the period of the day and night were often employed in reading.  It is no exaggeration to affirm, that out of twenty-four hours, he frequently read sixteen.  At Oxford, his diligence in this respect was exemplary, but it greatly increased afterwards, and I sometimes thought that he carried it to a pernicious excess:  I am sure, at least, that I was unable to keep pace with him.”  With Shelley study was a passion, and the acquisition of knowledge was the entrance into a thrice-hallowed sanctuary.  “The irreverent many cannot comprehend the awe—­the careless