in Shelley’s serious verses, by which they became unmistakably ridiculous.  Having achieved their purpose, they now bethought them of the proper means of publication.  Upon whom should the poems, a medley of tyrannicide and revolutionary raving, be fathered?  Peg Nicholson, a mad washerwoman, had recently attempted George the Third’s life with a carving-knife.  No more fitting author could be found.  They would give their pamphlet to the world as her work, edited by an admiring nephew.  The printer appreciated the joke no less than the authors of it.  He provided splendid paper and magnificent type; and before long the book of nonsense was in the hands of Oxford readers.  It sold for the high price of half-a-crown a copy; and, what is hardly credible, the gownsmen received it as a genuine production.  “It was indeed a kind of fashion to be seen reading it in public, as a mark of nice discernment, of a delicate and fastidious taste in poetry, and the best criterion of a choice spirit.”  Such was the genesis of “Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson”, edited by John Fitz Victor.  The name of the supposititious nephew reminds us of “Original Poems” by Victor and Cazire, and raises the question whether the poems in that lost volume may not have partly furnished forth this Oxford travesty.

Shelley’s next publication, or quasi-publication, was neither so innocent in substance nor so pleasant in its consequences.  After leaving Eton, he continued the habit, learned from Dr. Lind, of corresponding with distinguished persons whom he did not personally know.  Thus we find him about this time addressing Miss Felicia Browne (afterwards Mrs. Hemans) and Leigh Hunt.  He plied his correspondents with all kinds of questions; and as the dialectical interest was uppermost at Oxford, he now endeavoured to engage them in discussions on philosophical and religious topics.  We have seen that his favourite authors were Locke, Hume, and the French materialists.  With the impulsiveness peculiar to his nature, he adopted the negative conclusions of a shallow nominalistic philosophy.  It was a fundamental point with him to regard all questions, however sifted and settled by the wise of former ages, as still open; and in his inordinate thirst for liberty, he rejoiced to be the Deicide of a pernicious theological delusion.  In other words, he passed at Oxford by one leap from a state of indifferentism with regard to Christianity, into an attitude of vehement antagonism.  With a view to securing answers to his missives, he printed a short abstract of Hume’s and other arguments against the existence of a Deity, presented in a series of propositions, and signed with a mathematically important “Q.E.D.”  This document he forwarded to his proposed antagonists, expressing his inability to answer its arguments, and politely requesting them to help him.  When it so happened that any incautious correspondents acceded to this appeal, Shelley fell with merciless severity upon their feeble and commonplace reasoning.  The little pamphlet of two pages was entitled “The Necessity of Atheism”; and its proposed publication, beyond the limits of private circulation already described, is proved by an advertisement (February 9, 1811) in the “Oxford University and City Herald”.  It was not, however, actually offered for sale.