The friend in question was a Miss Eliza Hitchener, of Hurstpierpoint, who kept a sort of school, and who had attracted Shelley’s favourable notice by her advanced political and religious opinions.  He does not seem to have made her personal acquaintance; but some of his most interesting letters from Ireland are addressed to her.  How recklessly he entered into serious entanglements with people whom he had not learned to know, may be gathered from these extracts:—­“We will meet you in Wales, and never part again.  It will not do.  In compliance with Harriet’s earnest solicitations, I entreated you instantly to come and join our circle, resign your school, all, everything for us and the Irish cause.”  “I ought to count myself a favoured mortal with such a wife and such a friend.”  Harriet addressed this lady as “Portia;” and it is an undoubted fact that soon after their return to England, Miss Hitchener formed one of their permanent family circle.  Her entrance into it and her exit from it at no very distant period are, however, both obscure.  Before long she acquired another name than Portia in the Shelley household, and now she is better known as the “Brown Demon.”  Eliza Westbrook took a strong dislike to her; Harriet followed suit; and Shelley himself found that he had liked her better at a distance than in close companionship.  She had at last to be bought off or bribed to leave.

The scene now shifts with bewildering frequency; nor is it easy to trace the Shelleys in their rapid flight.  About the 21st of April, they settled for a short time at Nantgwilt, near Rhayader, in North Wales.  Ere long we find them at Lynmouth, on the Somersetshire coast.  Here Shelley continued his political propaganda, by circulating the “Declaration of Rights”, whereof mention has already been made.  It was, as Mr. W.M.  Rossetti first pointed out, a manifesto concerning the ends of government and the rights of man,—­framed in imitation of two similar French Revolutionary documents, issued by the Constituent Assembly in August, 1789, and by Robespierre in April, 1793. (Reprinted in McCarthy, page 324.) Shelley used to seal this pamphlet in bottles and set it afloat upon the sea, hoping perhaps that after this wise it would traverse St. George’s Channel and reach the sacred soil of Erin.  He also employed his servant, Daniel Hill, to distribute it among the Somersetshire farmers.  On the 19th of August this man was arrested in the streets of Barnstaple, and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for uttering a seditious pamphlet; and the remaining copies of the “Declaration of Rights” were destroyed.  In strong contrast with the puerility of these proceedings, is the grave and lofty “Letter to Lord Ellenborough”, composed at Lynmouth, and printed at Barnstaple.  (Reprinted in Lady Shelley’s Memorials, page 29.) A printer, named D.J.  Eaton, had recently been sentenced to imprisonment by his Lordship for publishing the Third Part of Paine’s “Age of Reason”.  Shelley’s epistle is an eloquent argument in favour of toleration and the freedom of the intellect, carrying the matter beyond the instance of legal tyranny which occasioned its composition, and treating it with philosophic, if impassioned seriousness.