He also employed his servant, Daniel Hill, to distribute it among the Somersetshire farmers.

On the 19th of August this man was arrested in 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.