traditional views regarding the divine nature of creation. Thelwall's career as an editor and journalist was quite successful, but the highlight of this period was his political activism. In the wake of the French Revolution, he became "intoxicated in the French doctrines of the day". He started to hold talks in London's radical societies and, having made acquaintance with fellow radical John Horne Tooke, and in 1792 co-founded the federation of radical clubs and societies, the London Corresponding Society. In 1794 he, Horne Tooke and Thomas Hardy were tried for treason following lectures protesting at the arrest of other political activists. After spending some time at the Tower and at Newgate, the three were acquitted. Government officials who considered him to be the most dangerous man in Britain continued to hound him even after his acquittal. In 1795, after prime minister William Pitt the Younger's Gagging Acts (the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act) received Royal Assent, Thelwall's lectures had a shift in theme, from contemporary political comment to the history of Rome to dodge censorship. Still, loyalists stormed Thelwall's public outings, forcing him to leave London and tour England. At King's Lynn, Wisbech and many of the other lectures in eastern England angry mobs impeded the hearings and in 1798 Thelwall decided to retire from politics. Thelwall also wrote poetry and in the second half of the 1790s associated with Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Coleridge praised Thelwell as "intrepid, eloquent, and honest; perhaps the only acting democrat that is honest". Through his correspondence and meetings with these poets Thelwall would forge a link between the Romantic movement in poetry and radical politics. Thelwall built himself a "hermitage" at Llyswen Farm, Brecknockshire, during his exile in Wales. His friends William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited him there in August 1798. In 1800 Thelwall reappeared as an elocution teacher, which in practice was a combination of speech therapist and rhetoric teacher. His career was very successful, and by 1818 he had earned enough money to buy a journal, The Champion, through which he called for parliamentary reform and in which he "denounced the government’s actions in the Peterloo massacre, and voiced scepticism about the Cato Street conspiracy". His volcanic style and political views, though, were not fitting for the middle-class public of the journal, which ended up in considerable losses. Thelwall therefore