hair from your lying beard, so I wish I could pluck malice from
your blasphemous heart," says Harding to Jewel, in that savage personal
invective that religious controversialists have permitted themselves in
all ages. Jewel does not seem ever to have answered in this unworthy
strain, and the singular purity of his life, the sincerity of his
opinions, and a certain lovable quality to which all his contemporaries
bear witness, gave even his political adversaries a personal attachment
to him. "I should love thee, Jewel, wert thou not a Zwinglian," cries
one. "In thy faith thou art a heretic, but sure in the life thou art
an angel"--surely the most splendid tribute that a man can have, when
we consider the bitterness and animosity bred by a difference of
religious belief. To all who loved him--and it seems to have been his
whole generation--his name gave the opportunity of affectionate puns,
quips, and little epigrams; to Queen Elizabeth he was "my Jewel," and
the epitaph Westcote makes upon him is that of St. Gregory upon St.
Basil: "His words were thunder, and his life lightning," and his memory
"a fragrant sweet-smelling odour, blown abroad . . . throughout the
whole kingdom."

We may find a lingering trace at Barnstaple, also, before going farther
north, of another eager spirit and earnest reformer, Shelley, whose
gift of poetry we accept, and whose quick courage we profit by, in a
world of thought where we breathe a little freer because of his efforts
and ideals, while we still despise or half shamefacedly apologize for
the strivings and struggles of his life. He prevailed upon Syle, a
printer of Barnstaple, to publish his "Letter to Lord Ellenborough,"
which was in effect a violent and heated attack upon this Judge for the
sentence he had passed on the publisher of Tom Paine's "Age of Reason,"
which was considered by Lord Ellenborough and that generation as a
dangerous and revolutionary document, subversive of the political
morals of the world. Those were the days of the French Revolution, and
it seemed to many, as honest as Shelley, that the whole social fabric
was threatening to crumble before the rising flood of anarchy,
bloodshed, and disorder. Syle was prevailed upon to withdraw the
greater number of copies--it speaks much for his courage and
convictions that he ever published it--and Shelley found it advisable
to leave Devon.

For Shelley had been living at Lynton during the early days of his
ill-fated