Mr. Wooler, however, arranged the matter, and Carlile’s offer was declined Mr. Sherwin, then a young man, (formerly keeper of South-well Bridewell, Nottinghamshire,) editing the _Republican_, perceived Carlile’s value, and offered him the publishing of his paper, which he accepted. Carlile guaranteed Mr. Sherwin against arrest, which left him free to be bold without danger. The shop on which he now entered was 183, Fleet Street, which Mr. Cobbett afterwards occupied. Carlile’s first ideas of politics were, that neither writers, printers, nor publishers were bold enough; and he now commenced to set the example he thought wanted. ‘I did not then see,’ he said, in the decline of his life, ‘what my experience has since taught me that the greatest despotism ruling the press is the popular ignorance. I made the calculation, which has been an error embittering my whole public life, that the entire people would assist and applaud an attempt, however humble, to set the press free. I have found myself like our parliamentary reformers idolizing a virtue of the imagination not yet brought into existence. I correctly made the calculation of having to pass through five or six years’ imprisonment, to appease the angered authorities of having defied their will; but I had not calculated that, after having conquered the authorities, by self-sacrifice, the greater difficulty would remain, of having to conquer the ignorance and vice of the people, by still more painful sacrifices.’ His first step was a resistance to the attempt of the poet laureat, Southey, to suppress the sale of his early Poem, ‘Wat Tyler.’ He sold twenty-five thousand of that poem in 1817. The second was a prosecution, defence, and imperfect verdict gained against Thomas Jonathan Wooller. The third was the reprint of the political works of Thomas Paine, by himself and Mr. Sherwin. The fourth was the trials and acquittals of William Hone, which Carlile forced on, by reprinting those suppressed political squibs called ‘The Parodies on the Book of Common Prayer.’ The Parodies cost him eighteen weeks’ imprisonment in the King’s Bench Prison, from which he was liberated with out trial, on the acquittals of William Hone. By the end of the year 1818 he had published the Theological Works of Thomas Paine. The prosecutions instituted induced him to go on printing other similar works, such as the ‘Doubts of Infidels,’ ‘Watson Refuted,’ ‘Palmer’s Principles of Nature,’ ‘The God of the Jews,’ &c. &c. By the month of October, 1819, he had at least six indictments pending against him. Two of the indictments were tried from the 12th to the 16th of October, and verdicts obtained against him. He was committed to the King’s Bench Prison, and on the 16th of November sentenced to fifteen hundred pounds fine, and three years imprisonment in Dorchester Goal. In the middle of the night he was handcuffed, and driven off between two armed officers to Dorchester, a distance of one hundred and twenty miles.