the streets of Barnstaple, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment for
uttering a seditious pamphlet; and the remaining copies of the
"Declaration of Rights" were destroyed. In strong contrast with the
puerility of these proceedings, is the grave and lofty "Letter to Lord
Ellenborough", composed at Lynmouth, and printed at Barnstaple.
(Reprinted in Lady Shelley's Memorials, page 29.) A printer, named D.J.
Eaton, had recently been sentenced to imprisonment by his Lordship for
publishing the Third Part of Paine's "Age of Reason". Shelley's epistle
is an eloquent argument in favour of toleration and the freedom of the
intellect, carrying the matter beyond the instance of legal tyranny
which occasioned its composition, and treating it with philosophic, if
impassioned seriousness.

An extract from this composition will serve to show his power of
handling weighty English prose, while yet a youth of hardly twenty. I
have chosen a passage bearing on his theological opinions:--

"Moral qualities are such as only a human being can possess. To
attribute them to the Spirit of the Universe, or to suppose that it is
capable of altering them, is to degrade God into man, and to annex to
this incomprehensible Being qualities incompatible with any possible
definition of his nature.

"It may be here objected: Ought not the Creator to possess the
perfections of the creature? No. To attribute to God the moral qualities
of man, is to suppose him susceptible of passions, which, arising out of
corporeal organization, it is plain that a pure spirit cannot
possess.... But even suppose, with the vulgar, that God is a venerable
old man, seated on a throne of clouds, his breast the theatre of various
passions, analogous to those of humanity, his will changeable and