distribute copies, with instructions where and how to give them. His
account corresponds with the multitudes of people who possess them. I
stand at the balcony of our window and watch till I see a man WHO LOOKS
LIKELY. I throw a book to him."

A postscript to this letter lets us see the propaganda from Harriet's
point of view. "I am sure you would laugh were you to see us give the
pamphlets. We throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we
pass in the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it
is done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman's
hood of a cloak."

The purpose of this address was to rouse the Irish people to a sense of
their real misery, to point out that Catholic Emancipation and a Repeal
of the Union Act were the only radical remedies for their wrongs, and to
teach them the spirit in which they should attempt a revolution. On the
last point Shelley felt intensely. The whole address aims at the
inculcation of a noble moral temper, tolerant, peaceful, resolute,
rational, and self-denying. Considered as a treatise on the principles
which should govern patriots during a great national crisis, the
document is admirable: and if the inhabitants of Dublin had been a
population of Shelleys, its effect might have been permanent and
overwhelming. The mistake lay in supposing that a people whom the poet
himself described as "of scarcely greater elevation in the scale of
intellectual being than the oyster," were qualified to take the remedy
of their grievances into their own hands, or were amenable to such sound
reasoning as he poured forth. He told Godwin that he had "wilfully
vulgarized the language of this pamphlet, in order to reduce the remarks
it contains to the taste and comprehension of the Irish peasantry." A
few extracts will enable the reader to judge how far he had succeeded in