By this time, however, Moxon, in spite of his bad poetry, had made a wide reputation as a poetical publisher, and from his establishment was issued, not only all that was most valuable of contemporary poetical literature, but with true catholic taste, the works of our older dramatic poets, edited for the most part by the Rev. Alexander Dyce. By degrees, too, Moxon was enabled to add to his catalogue the works of many of the poets who had shed a lustre upon the two first decades of this century, especially the works of Keats, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt. In 1839 he brought out Mrs. Shelley’s edition of her husband’s poems--the first “complete edition” that had been published. In the following year a bookseller in the Strand named Hetherington was indicted for selling a work entitled “Haslam’s Letters to the Clergy of all Denominations,” and was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment, as having published in this volume sundry “libels” against the Old Testament. While the trial was pending, Hetherington commissioned a servant of his, named Holt, to purchase copies of “Shelley’s Poems” from the publisher, and from the retail dealers, and then obtained a similar indictment against Moxon. The celebrated trial the “Queen _v._ Moxon” was of course the result. The prosecution relied chiefly upon certain passages in “Queen Mab,” more especially in the notes, and these were read in order to prove the charge of blasphemy. Mr. Serjeant Talfourd was engaged for the defence. “I am called,” he commenced, “from the bar in which I usually practise, to defend from the odious charge of blasphemy one with whom I have been acquainted for many years--one whom I have always believed incapable of wilful offence towards God or towards man--one who was introduced to me in early days, by the dearest of my friends who has gone before--by Charles Lamb--to whom the wife of the defendant was an adopted daughter.” After a magnificent oration in which he asked, with a fitting indignation, “if the publisher of any penny blasphemy is to have the right of prescribing to us legally that such and such pages are to be torn from the treasured volumes of our choicest literature,” he left in the hands of the jury “the cause of genius--the cause of learning--the cause of history--the cause of thought,” and concluded by a tribute to Moxon’s character--“beginning his career under the auspices of Rogers, the eldest of a great age of poets, and blessed with the continued support of that excellent person, who never broke by one unworthy line the charm of moral grace which pervades his works, he has been associated with Lamb, whose kindness ennobled all sects, all parties, all classes, and whose genius shed new and pleasant lights on daily life; with Southey, the pure and childlike in heart; with Coleridge, in the light of whose Christian philosophy the indicted poems would assume their true character, as mournful, yet salutary, specimens of