When it appeared that the young gentleman, who had brought the ignorant Irishman into trouble, would altogether escape punishment, local sentiment passed to warmer indignation against the misdemeanant of superior social condition. Unmindful of his sentimental distress, ‘society’ came to the very wrong conclusion that he suffered nothing at all. Whilst Daniel Hill lived in the popular imagination as a poor fellow undergoing the rigour of prison discipline, the young gentleman was supposed to be enjoying himself at Lynton. It was whispered that the magistrates had not acted rightly in dealing so hardly with the poor and ignorant man, whilst they allowed the rich and educated one to go scot-free. Though they had acted with the best intentions and under the best advice, the magistrates felt there had been a serious miscarriage of justice. To some of them it was consolatory to reflect that measures could still be taken for the punishment of the youthful libeller of the Lord Chief Justice. That it was in contemplation to proceed against the author and printer of the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_, or at least that the talk of Barnstaple turned on proceedings for their punishment, may be inferred from Mr. Syle’s alarm and vain endeavours to recover the fifty copies of the _Letter_, delivered to Shelley a day or two before Daniel Hill’s arrest. Alarmed by the arrest, Mr. Syle was quick to destroy all copies of the pamphlet lying in his office; the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_ being the third (possibly, the fourth) of Shelley’s juvenile productions to be suppressed by a panic-struck printer.