nsidered blasphemy, and the
person so offending was punished most severely by the criminal laws.
At the present time this wretched remnant of the dark ages is
practically a dead letter. The friends of Shelley suffered from this
most intolerant spirit. Keats, it is believed by many, was wounded
unto death for daring to speak on behalf of freedom, and we are given
glimpses in the _Adonais_ of his feelings on the subject; Leigh Hunt
and his brother were imprisoned and fined for the same; the publisher
of the pirated edition of Shelley's _Queen Mab_ was cast into Newgate;
Eaton, a London bookseller, had been sentenced by Lord Ellenborough to
a lengthened incarceration, for publishing Paine's _Age of Reason_,
and hundreds of others suffered similarly. The abominable circumstance
of Eaton's conviction caused great uproar; the Marquis of Wellesley,
in the House of Lords, stated it was "contrary to the mild spirit of
the Christian religion; for no sanction can be found under that
dispensation which will warrant a government to impose disabilities
and penalties upon any man on account of his religious opinions."
Shelley, who was then only nineteen years of age, and had himself
suffered from bigotry at Oxford, threw himself publicly into the
controversy with great vehemence, with "a composition of great
eloquence and logical exactness of reasoning, and the truths which it
contains on the subject of universal toleration are now generally
admitted." Lady Shelley, from whom I have just quoted, says that her
husband's father, "from his earliest boyhood to his latest years,
whatever varieties of opinion may have marked his intellectual course,
never for a moment swerved from the noble doctrine of unbounded
liberty of thought and speech. To him the rights of intellect were
sacred; and all kings, teachers, or priests who sought to circumscribe
the activity of discussion, and to check by force the full development
of the reasoning powers, he regarded as enemies to the independence of
man, who did their utmost to destroy the spiritual essence of our
being."

To Shelley's able advocacy, and to his appeals against the stamping
out of political and social truths opposed to custom, particularly the
celebrated letter to Lord Ellenborough, it cannot be denied that the
toleration now enjoyed in Great Britain owes much.

Shelley was one of those who most earnestly deprecated punishment by
death. In his early years, if a man stole a sheep, or sh