With Hogg the like process was
repeated. Their offence, as entered on the College records, was that of
'contumaciously refusing to answer questions,' and 'repeatedly declining
to disavow' the authorship of the work. In strictness therefore they
were expelled, not for being proclaimed atheists, but for defying
academic authority, which required to be satisfied as to that question.
Shortly before this disaster an engagement between Shelley and his first
cousin on the mother's side, Miss Harriet Grove, had come to an end,
owing to the alarm excited by the youth's sceptical opinions.
Settling in lodgings in London, and parting from Hogg, who went to York
to study conveyancing, Percy pretty soon found a substitute for Harriet
Grove in Harriet Westbrook, a girl of fifteen, schoolfellow of two of
his sisters at Clapham. She was exceedingly pretty, daughter of a
retired hotel-keeper in easy circumstances. Shelley wanted to talk both
her and his sisters out of Christianity; and he cultivated the
acquaintance of herself and of her much less juvenile sister Eliza,
calling from time to time at their father's house in Chapel Street,
Grosvenor Square.
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