The outline of the essay, begun in Radnorshire, was filled in as the writer made his leisurely progress to North Devon, where he put the last touches to the Letter to _Lord Ellenborough, occasioned by the Sentence which he passed on Mr. D. I. Eaton, as Publisher of the Third Part of Paine’s Age of Reason_,--an essay which in respect to literary style, is a great advance on the author’s previous prose writings, without containing a single passage to justify the praise lavished by the poet’s idolaters on the perverse performance. The epistle having been touched in to his satisfaction, and most likely read to Portia (I adhere to Harriett’s way of spelling the name), Shelley took the manuscript to Barnstaple and requested Mr. Syle, the principal bookseller and printer of the borough, to put it in type and furnish him with a thousand copies. The matter, which the bookseller was thus commissioned to make into a printed pamphlet, was a strenuous and pungent libel on the Lord Chief Justice. Whilst the pamphlet was passing through the press, it appears from Mr. Chanter’s _Sketches of the Literary History of Barnstaple_, that Shelley came from time to time to Mr. Syle’s place of business, for the purpose of correcting proofs and revises. That Shelley journeyed to and fro between Lynton and Barnstaple for this purpose, there is no doubt in the mind of the present writer, who knows too much of his good friend, Mr. John Roberts Chanter, to be capable of questioning the accuracy of his written statements. The work, that was intended to cover Lord Ellenborough with historical infamy, seems to have been corrected for press to the last point as early as 16th August, 1812. Anyhow, on the 18th of that month the author dispatched from Lynmouth fifty copies of the _Letter_ to his friend Mr. Hookham, of London, the Old-Bond-Street bookseller; saying with his pen, ‘I enclose also two pamphlets which I printed and distributed whilst in Ireland some months ago (no bookseller daring to publish them). They were on that account attended with only partial success, and I request your opinion as to the probable result of publishing them with the annexed suggestions in one pamphlet, with an explanatory preface in London.’ Had Shelley been so much more truth-loving than other men, as his idolaters declare him, he would have told Mr. Hookham that the failure of the two Irish pamphlets had been complete, instead of representing they had achieved a partial success. The statement that the pamphlets had been in some degree successful was a petty untruth, which is more than slightly offensive, from being told to the bookseller who was asked to reprint the two failures. The Shelley, who wrote on this matter of business to Mr. Hookham, was the same Shelley who planted the _Victor-and-Cazire_ piracies on Mr. Stockdale.