A copy of this syllabus reached a Fellow of another college, who made the Master of the University acquainted with the fact.  On the morning of March 25, 1811, Shelley was sent for to the Senior Common Room, and asked whether he acknowledged himself to be the author of the obnoxious pamphlet.  On his refusal to answer this question, he was served with a formal sentence of expulsion duly drawn up and sealed.  The college authorities have been blamed for unfair dealing in this matter.  It is urged that they ought to have proceeded by the legal method of calling witnesses; and that the sentence was not only out of all proportion to the offence, but that it ought not to have been executed till persuasion had been tried.  With regard to the former indictment, I do not think that a young man still in statu pupillari, who refused to purge himself of what he must have known to be a serious charge, had any reason to expect from his tutors the formalities of an English court of law.  There is no doubt that the Fellows were satisfied of his being the real author; else they could not have ventured on so summary a measure as expulsion.  Their question was probably intended to give the culprit an occasion for apology, of which they foresaw he would not avail himself.  With regard to the second, it is true that Shelley was amenable to kindness, and that gentle and wise treatment from men whom he respected might possibly have brought him to retract his syllabus.  But it must be remembered that he despised the Oxford dons with all his heart; and they were probably aware of this.  He was a dexterous, impassioned reasoner, whom they little cared to encounter in argument on such a topic.  During his short period of residence, moreover, he had not shown himself so tractable as to secure the good wishes of superiors, who prefer conformity to incommensurable genius.  It is likely that they were not averse to getting rid of him as a man dangerous to the peace of their society; and now they had a good occasion.  Nor was it to be expected that the champion and apostle of Atheism—­and Shelley was certainly both, in spite of Hogg’s attempts to tone down the purpose of his document—­should be unmolested in his propaganda by the aspirants to fat livings and ecclesiastical dignities.  Real blame, however, attaches to these men:  first, for their dulness to discern Shelley’s amiable qualities; and, secondly, for the prejudgment of the case implied in the immediate delivery of their sentence.  Both Hogg and Shelley accused them, besides, of a gross brutality, which was, to say the least, unseemly on so serious an occasion.  At the beginning of this century the learning and the manners of Oxford dons were at a low ebb; and the Fellows of University College acted harshly but not altogether unjustly, ignorantly but after their own kind, in this matter of Shelley’s expulsion. $Non ragionem di lor, ma guarda e passa.  Hogg, who stood by his friend manfully at this crisis, and dared the authorities to deal with him as they had dealt with Shelley, adding that they had just as much real proof to act upon in his case, and intimating his intention of returning the same answer as to the authorship of the pamphlet, was likewise expelled.  The two friends left Oxford together by coach on the morning of the 26th of March.