Immediately after his first marriage Shelley began to play the part of a political agitator. He went to Dublin to further the cause of Catholic emancipation, wrote a very juvenile address to the Irish people, in which he besought them to refrain from the violent deeds with which the French Revolution had been stained, and was childish enough to throw down copies of it from the balcony of his hotel, in front of any of the passers-by who looked as if they might be responsive. We gain some idea of the childish spirit in which both he and his young wife regarded the matter, from reading that, one day when they were walking together, he could not resist amusing himself by popping the address into the hood of a lady's cloak, a performance which made his wife, as she herself writes, "almost die of laughing." Shelley attended several political meetings, and on one occasion spoke for more than an hour in the presence of O'Connell and other celebrities. The accounts of his eloquence given by contemporaries are so enthusiastic that they might almost lead us to believe him to have been even greater as an orator than as a poet. The next time Shelley came into collision with the party in power, the collision was of a much more violent and tragic nature. Harriet was dead, and her father had filed a petition in Chancery to determine which was the fit and proper person to educate her children--he, their grandfather, the retired hotel-keeper, or their father, Shelley, the author of _Queen Mab_ and _Alastor_, who was accused of atheism, and would in all probability bring up his children as atheists. Lord Eldon's judgment was to the effect that, seeing that Shelley's conduct had hitherto been highly immoral, and that, far from being ashamed of this, he was proud of his immoral principles and tried to impress them upon others, the law was in its right in depriving him entirely of the custody of his children, and at the same time decreeing that he should be deprived of a fifth of his income for their maintenance. The children were placed in charge of a clergyman of the Church of England. Shelley felt this blow so terribly that even his most intimate friends never dared speak of the children to him. In his poem _To the Lord Chancellor_ he cries: "I curse thee by a parent's outraged love; By hopes long cherished and too lately lost; By gentle feelings thou could'st never prove; By griefs which thy stern nature never crossed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . By the false cant which on their innocent lips Must hang like poison on an opening bloom; By the dark creeds which cover with eclipse Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (By) the despair which bids a father groan, And cry, 'My children are no longer mine; The blood within those veins may be my own, But, tyrant, their polluted souls are thine.'"