^{Note 1 in page 489} See Walter E. Peck, Shelley, his Life and Work (Boston, 1927); Carl Grabo, The Magic Plant: The Growth of Shelley's Thought (University of North Carolina Press, 1936); Newman I. White, Shelley (New York, 1940). The main references can be traced most easily in all three works by consulting the index to each.

^{Note 2 in page 489} See his letter to Grosvenor Bedford, January 4, 1812, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey (London, 1850), iii, 325–326; and his letter to John Rickman, January 6, 1812, quoted in White, Shelley, ii, 619.

^{Note 3 in page 489} See, for instance, Shelley's letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, December 26, 1811, The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, Julian Edition (London, 1926), viii, 223; see also viii, 236.

^{Note 4 in page 489} “Our short personal intercourse has always been remembered with pleasure ... We parted, I think, with feelings of mutual kindness”—To Robert Southey, June 26, 1820, Julian Edition, x, 178.

^{Note 5 in page 490} To Robert Southey, March 7, 1816, Julian Edition, ix, 146.

^{Note 6 in page 490} The Diaries of Henry Crabb Robinson (London, 1938), p. 212.

^{Note 7 in page 490} Review of Leigh Hunt's Foliage, Quarterly Review, xviii (January, 1818), 328–329. The comments of The Quarterly Review will be found in part in White, The Unextinguished Hearth (Duke University Press, 1938), pp. 124–125. The review was probably written either by Croker or John Taylor Coleridge.

^{Note 8 in page 490} To Leigh Hunt, December 22, 1818, Julian Edition, x, 9–10.

^{Note 9 in page 490} Robert Southey, To the Editor of The Courier, December 8, 1824, quoted in Appendix I, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. R. E. Prothero (London, 1901), vi, 396.

^{Note 10 in page 491} Leigh Hunt, To Mary Shelley, March 9, 1819, quoted in Shelley and Mary (photostatic copy in Library of Congress), ii, 368.

^{Note 11 in page 491} Reprinted in White, The Unextinguished Hearth, pp. 133–142.

^{Note 12 in page 491} To Leigh Hunt, November 2, 1819, Julian Edition, x, 103.

^{Note 13 in page 491} Julian Edition, x, 97. That in his comments on “the author of the article” Shelley had Southey in mind is indicated by the fact that he at that date still believed Southey to be the author. The culprit actually was John Taylor Coleridge. When, a year later, in June, 1820, Shelley wrote to Southey on this article he stated: “Some friends of mine persist in affirming that you are the author....”—Julian Edition, x, 178. Who were these “friends”? We have no records of any such suggestions in letters to Shelley, although it is not impossible that they may have existed in letters now lost. The previous year however, when Shelley first jumped to the conclusion of Southey's authorship, there is no mention of such “friends.” As soon as he saw the Quarterly attack, he wrote to the Olliers: “Southey wrote the article in question, I am well aware”—To Charles and James Ollier, October 15, 1819, Julian Edition, x, 95; and to Hunt a few weeks later: “As to the perverse-hearted writer of these calumnies, I feel assured that it is Southey”—To Leigh Hunt, November 2, 1819, Julian Edition, x, 103. Shelley, it seems to me was trying to trap Southey into a confession of authorship by pretending that he had received inside information. And Southey, we might note, would probably have fallen into the trap if he had really been the author, for in his second letter to The Courier during his controversy with Byron in 1824, he stated that Shelley said he had been “induced to ask the question by the positive declaration of some friends in England, that the article was mine”—To the Editor of The Courier, December 8, 1824, quoted in Appendix I, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, vi, 396. Shelley, however, said nothing about friends “in England.” He said simply “some friends of mine persist...,” and left Southey to believe that he had received authoritative word from London.

^{Note 14 in page 491} To Robert Southey, August 17, 1820, Julian Edition, x, 203–205. Professor Grabo comments on this letter: “An excoriating reply to Southey's smugness and deserved. Letters so severe are rare in Shelley”—Grabo, op. cit., p. 330. Southey's correspondence with Shelley is included in The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, ed. Edward Dowden (London, 1881), pp. 359–366.

^{Note 15 in page 492} To Leigh Hunt, December 22, 1818, Julian Edition, x, 9–10, and to Leigh Hunt, November 2, 1819, Julian Edition, x, 103. Southey was one of those who spread the story of Shelley's signing “atheos” in the guest book at Mont Anvert. He was also accused of circulating a story of a “league of incest” among Byron, Claire, Shelley, and Mary; but this he denied.

^{Note 16 in page 492} Shelley does tentatively suggest Gifford in his letter to Hunt of December 22, 1818, but rejects him in favor of Southey—Julian Edition, x, 10.

^{Note 17 in page 492} There were actually two Secret Committee Reports, one presented to the Lords and one to the Commons. See T. C. Hansard, The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, xxxv (1817) 411–420; 438–447.

^{Note 18 in page 493} Shelley read, and read avidly, every article on himself or his works that was available to him. When he heard that the Quarterly review of The Revolt of Islam was appearing, he wrote to his publishers asking them to cut it out and send it to him (in Italy) by letter post so that he might get it sooner—To Charles and James Ollier, September 6, 1819, Julian Edition, x, 79.

^{Note 19 in page 493} These included Sir Francis Burdett, Lord Brougham, Lord Grey, Lord Holland, Lord Grosvenor, Douglas Kinnaird, Lord Cochrane, William Cobbett, Major Cartwright, Francis Place, Alderman Waithman, Robert Owen, and the Lord Mayor of London.—To Charles Ollier, c. March 14, 1817, Julian Edition, ix, 222–223.

^{Note 20 in page 493} Julian Edition, vi, 67.

^{Note 21 in page 493} Shelley and Mary, i, 203–204. We may note also that The Quarterly Review appears in Mary's annual reading list for the first and only time in the year 1817, as though she deemed this particular volume of special interest.

^{Note 22 in page 493} For Hogg see his letter to Shelley, June 15, 1821, quoted in Shelley and Mary, iii, 640; for Stockdale and the Olliers see Shelley's letter to Charles Ollier, February 22, 1817, and ca. March 14, 1817, Julian Edition, ix, 221, 223; for Hone, To William Hone, April 20, 1817, Julian Edition, ix, 225; and also To Charles Ollier, ca. March 14, 1817, Julian Edition, ix, 223; for the Hunts see H. Buxton Forman, The Shelley Library: An Essay in Bibliography, Shelley Society Publications, ser. 4, Miscellaneous, no. 1 (London, 1886), p. 66; for Hookham, To Charles Ollier, ca. March 14, 1817, Julian Edition, ix, 223. Presumably Peacock and Godwin were informed also, for Peacock was living in Marlow at the time, and both Shelley and Mary paid frequent visits to the Godwin household in London (where in all probability the loquacious Mrs. Godwin heard of it as well).

^{Note 23 in page 494} “The earliest facts [i.e., on Shelley's life] I stated upon his own authority, as I had heard them from his own lips; the latter were of public notoriety”—To the Editor of The Courier, December 8, 1824, quoted in Appendix I, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, vi, 397. See also Southey's second letter to Shelley in 1820, The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, p. 364.

^{Note 24 in page 494} Southey's authorship of the article would, I presume, be immediately obvious from the fact that it follows the same pattern as the article which he had published in the previous issue of The Quarterly (and which was attacked as his in the House of Commons), especially as he indulges in a vigorous defense of this previous article—Quarterly Review, xvi (January, 1817), 547, n.

According to The Edinburgh Review, in its comments on the first of these antireform articles, Southey never attempted to conceal the authorship of his work in The Quarterly: “The truth is, that the writers of one half of the articles in a review are impatient to be known, and take effectual measures to be so. This we take to be the case of Mr. Southey. We have understood that he makes no secret of his having written the papers in question,—or indeed of anything else with which he illuminates the public:—and, to be sure, though a dilettanti contributor may be a little shy of acknowledging his pieces and desirous of the protection of his mask, it is hardly to be imagined that a professional bookmaker, when he publishes anonymously, has any desire to be really concealed; and accordingly, he and his publishers commonly take good care that the fame of his name shall suffer no obscuration”—Edinburgh Review, xxviii (1817), 158.

This contention of The Edinburgh seems to be borne out by the fact that Wordsworth was writing quite openly about the 1817 article as Southey's by June 22: “Southey's last article in the Q. R. I have not yet seen. We have repeatedly conversed upon the state of the country with little difference of opinion; except that in his vivid perception of the danger to be apprehended by the disaffected urging on of the Rabble....”—The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1937), ii, 793.

^{Note 25 in page 495} Quarterly Review, xvi (January, 1817), 538–539. Italics mine here and elsewhere, unless otherwise stated.

Following his comments on exhorting the “youth” to “chuse anything rather than literature,” Southey goes into a brief digression on trades and professions that are preferable as a career. Here, he may be thinking partly of his own struggles as a man of letters. When, however, he turns a few lines later on, to his picture of the “degeneration” of such a youth, it is clear that he is no longer, even in part, thinking of himself. As his Letter to William Smith reveals, he was very anxious to clear himself of any such charges: “For while I imbibed the republican opinions of the day, I escaped the Atheism and the leprous immorality which generally accompanied them”—Appendix to The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey (ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey), iv, 378.

That a certain blending of his own case with that of Shelley may have taken place is shown by his letter to Grosvenor Bedford, January 4, 1812, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, iii, 325–326. See also note 27 below.

^{Note 26 in page 495} See Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1886), ii, 110, n.; 335, n.; Forman, ed., A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote, p. 11; Peck, op. cit., i, 523; White, The Unextinguished Hearth, p. 363.

^{Note 27 in page 496} To Grosvenor Bedford, January 4, 1812, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, iii, 325–326. The final reference to advice on how Shelley should conduct himself on his £6000 a year seems to indicate that Southey not only advised Shelley in regard to his beliefs, but also on his career, or “profession.” See also Southey's letter to John Rickman, January 6, 1812, quoted in White, Shelley, i, 619.

This identification of himself with Shelley would perhaps, it is interesting to note, seem even more striking a few years later when Shelley eloped with the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. Southey in his youth had been quite a devotee of Mary Wollstonecraft and had favored her with a rather ogling dedication in his Triumph of Woman, in 1795. Byron asserted in the course of his quarrel with Southey in later years that Southey “loved Mary Wollstonecraft” and “did his best to get her and could not,” but whether he had any basis for his remarks I have not been able to ascertain—To John Murray, May 20, 1820, Letters and Journals, v, 28; and “Reply to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine,” Appendix ix, Byron's Works: Letters and Journals, iv, 483. Southey, it seems to me, must have seen in Shelley a man who adopted both in his life and his opinions a course which Southey had himself begun and later revolted from; and in this, perhaps, we have part of the explanation for his hatred of the younger poet.

^{Note 28 in page 497} To Caroline Bowles, July 7, 1822, The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, pp. 272–328.

^{Note 29 in page 497} Ibid., pp. 364–365.

^{Note 30 in page 497} Ibid., p. 360.

^{Note 31 in page 497} Ibid., pp. 365–366.

^{Note 32 in page 498} Ibid., p. 364.

^{Note 33 in page 498} Ibid., p. 359. And in his second letter to Shelley, Southey refers to “the detestable ... Cenci”—ibid., p. 365.

^{Note 34 in page 498} Ibid., p. 359.

^{Note 35 in page 498} Ibid., p. 360.

^{Note 36 in page 498} To the Editor of The Courier, December 8, 1824, quoted in Appendix I, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, vi, 397, n.

^{Note 37 in page 499} Quarterly Review, xvi (January, 1817), pp. 540–541.

^{Note 38 in page 499} Louis-Ange Pitou, the revolutionary poet. For a brief account of him see Alfred Allinson, The Days of the Directoire (London, 1910), pp. 143–149.

^{Note 39 in page 499} Quarterly Review, xvi (January, 1817), 540, n. Collot d'Herbois was a Jacobine and a member of the notorious Committee of Public Safety. He was exiled in 1795 and died the following year. He features as a character in The Fall of Robespierre. In the phrase “not naturally wicked” Southey italicizes “not.”

^{Note 40 in page 499} The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, p. 359. It is interesting, too, to note that Pitou was actually eighteen, and not nineteen at the time—Allinson, op. cit., p. 145.

^{Note 41 in page 499} The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, p. 364.

^{Note 42 in page 500} Allinson, op. cit., p. 145.

^{Note 43 in page 500} The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, p. 360.

^{Note 44 in page 500} Ibid., p. 365.

^{Note 45 in page 500} Ibid., p. 365.

^{Note 46 in page 501} Quarterly Review, xvi (January, 1817), pp. 540–541.

^{Note 47 in page 501} Ibid., p. 541.

^{Note 48 in page 501} The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, p. 360.

^{Note 49 in page 501} Ibid., p. 363.

^{Note 50 in page 501} Ibid., p. 359. See also his letter to Grosvenor Bedford in January, 1812: “I tell him all the difference between us is that he is nineteen, and I am thirty-seven....”—The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, iii, 325–326. The remark seems to have annoyed Shelley at the time, for he repeated it in a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener on January 7, 1812: “Southey did not think the reasoning conclusive; he has a very happy knack when truth goes against him, of saying: ‘Oh! when you are as old as I am, you will think with me,’ this talent he employed in the above instance. Nothing can well be more weak”—Julian Edition, viii, 235–236. He repeats it also to Godwin on January 16: “He says, ‘You will think as I do when you are as old.’ I do not feel the least disposition to be Mr. S's Proselyte”—Julian Edition, viii, 244. See also Southey's letter to Rickman quoted in White, Shelley, i, 619.

^{Note 51 in page 502} The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, p. 360.

^{Note 52 in page 502} Ibid., p. 360. Southey is also hitting at Shelley's “vanity” when in the final paragraph of his second letter he remarks that “any affliction which might bring you to a better mind would be a dispensation of mercy”—ibid., p. 365.

^{Note 53 in page 502} The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, iii, 326.

^{Note 54 in page 502} To Robert Southey, March 7, 1816, Julian Edition, ix, 146. That Southey seems to have kept this letter is indicated by his comment during the controversy with Byron: “I have preserved his letters, together with copies of my own”—To the Editor of The Courier, December 8, 1824, Appendix I, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, vi, 397.

^{Note 55 in page 502} The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, pp. 364, 360.

^{Note 56 in page 503} To Lord Byron, January 17, 1817, Julian Edition, ix, 219.

^{Note 57 in page 503} Shelley might also suspect covert references to himself in some of Southey's other comments, especially those on atheists, e.g.: Quarterly Review, xvi (January, 1817), 522, 527, 528, 536–537.

^{Note 58 in page 504} Edinburgh Review, xxviii (1817), 158.

^{Note 59 in page 504} To the Editor of The Courier, December 8, 1824, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, vi, 397. Nor should we forget Southey's rather shabby treatment of Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798, when he published a damning review of the lyrical ballads before they appeared, without the knowledge of his friends, the authors. That Shelley himself had little faith in Southey's integrity and willingness to admit he had been in the wrong, is clear from his comment: “I cannot hope that you will be candid enough to feel, or, if you feel, to own that you have done ill in accusing, even in your mind, an innocent and a persecuted man....”—To Robert Southey, August 17, 1820, Julian Edition, x, 205.

^{Note 60 in page 504} It seems likely that Shelley mentioned this 1817 article of Southey's in his diatribe to Crabb Robinson, for Robinson records among the main points of Shelley's attack on Southey: “his pension and his laureateship, his early zeal and his recent virulence”—The Diaries of Henry Crabb Robinson, p. 212. When we inquire into what writings of Southey's could be called “recent virulence” in November, 1817, we find that there are only two, the article in The Quarterly, which had appeared in April, and the Letter to William Smith, also published in April.

It is not impossible that Shelley also has Southey in mind in his attack on critics in the preface to The Revolt of Islam. He is there attacking with an unusual bitterness “our greatest Poets” who, bribed with “worthless adulation,” have descended to a low species of criticism and become “accomplices in the daily murder of all genius.” Such comments in the works of a radical author, whether it be Hunt, Hazlitt, Byron, or Shelley can refer only to the perennial Tory trio of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. As neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth, however, had attacked Shelley, it seems not unlikely that he had Southey mainly in mind. For the relevant passages from the preface to The Revolt of Islam, written, it is important to note, in the fall of 1817, see Julian Edition, i, 245.

^{Note 61 in page 505} White, Shelley, ii, 296–297.

^{Note 62 in page 505} Just when Shelley began to doubt whether Southey really was the author of the Quarterly review of The Revolt of Islam is not certain. That he was not convinced at the time of his second letter to Southey (August 17, 1820) that Southey was not the author seems indicated by his ironical comment: “I recollect expressing what contempt I felt, in the hope that you might meet the wretched hireling, who has so closely imitated your style as to deceive all but those who knew you into a belief that he was you”; and his remark already noted: “I cannot hope that you will be candid enough to feel, or, if you feel, to own that you have done ill in accusing, even in your mind, an innocent and a persecuted man....”—Julian Edition, x, 203–205. On June 11, 1821, he writes to Ollier that he has “discovered” (wrongly) that the author was Milman, and on July 16, 1821, he informs Byron that he believes it to be either Milman or Gifford“—Julian Edition, x, 275, 284. He may, therefore, have considered Southey as a possibility as late as June, 1821.

^{Note 63 in page 506} To William Gifford (?) November, 1820), Julian Edition, x, 218.

^{Note 64 in page 506} Byron and Hazlitt never tire of making similar charges. See, for instance, Don Juan, iii, 80; Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (London, 1824), p. 238; “Appendix to The Two Foscari,” quoted in Appendix I, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, vi, 388. For Hazlitt see The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London, 1902), iii, 202, 203, 222.

^{Note 65 in page 507} To the Editor of The Courier, December 8, 1824, quoted in Appendix i, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, vi, 397, n. Italics Southy's.

^{Note 66 in page 507} Cancelled passages of Adonais, Julian Edition, ii, 407.

^{Note 67 in page 507} See Shelley's letter to William Gifford, ? November, 1820, Julian Edition, x, 218. See also his comments on Gifford in his letter to Hunt of December 22, 1818—Julian Edition, x, 10. Shelley may have been influenced by Byron's admiration for Gifford.

^{Note 68 in page 507} For some of Shelley's adverse comments on Southey see his letters to Hunt of December 22, 1818, and November 2, 1819—Julian Edition, x, 9–10, 103; and his letters to Southey of June 26 and August 17, 1820—Julian Edition, x, 178, 203–205. Shelley also wrote a fragmentary verse diatribe on Southey entitled Satire on Satire, and took some blows at him in Swellfool the Tyrant (i. i. 37–38, and possibly also in i. i. 365–371, and ii. i. 25–30), and A Defence of Poetry—Julian Edition, vii, 138.

^{Note 69 in page 508} Preface to Adonais, Julian Edition, ii, 387–388.

^{Note 70 in page 508} Julian Edition, x, 203–205. Shelley italicizes “guilt.”

^{Note 71 in page 508} In one of Hazlitt's attacks on Southey in The Examiner, of which Shelley was a regular reader, he speaks of the Laureate as “decked out in the trappings of his prostitution” and comments that “A woman is more liable to prostitute her person at nineteen—a man is more likely to prostitute his understanding at forty”—“The Courier and ‘The Wat Tyler’,” The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, iii, 203, 202.

^{Note 72 in page 509} See also Shelley's letter to Southey of June 26, 1820, where he hints that Southey is a “wretched hireling”—Julian Edition, x, 178.

^{Note 73 in page 509} Quoted in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (New York, 1935), p. 221.

^{Note 74 in page 509} It is interesting to note that in Byron's little jingle:

the only name that is not inserted for obvious reasons of rhyme is Southey's.

It seems likely that Byron was influenced in his belief by Shelley. On August 6, 1821, Shelley visited Byron at Ravenna and sat up until five in the morning talking with him. On August 7, we find Byron, who previously had been sceptical on the point, writing with assurance to Murray of “poor Keats now slain by the Quarterly Review”—The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, v, 338. Shelley had attempted to convince Byron previously in his letter of April 16, though not at that time, apparently, with complete success.

^{Note 75 in page 509} Adonais, 244–246.

^{Note 76 in page 510} Adonais, 316–319, 325–333, 334–337.

^{Note 77 in page 510} As Professor White indicates—Shelley, ii, 296–297.

^{Note 78 in page 510} Adapted from Milton, Paradise Lost, iv, 828–829.

^{Note 79 in page 510} This conversation must have taken place sometime between Medwin's arrival at Pisa in November, 1821, and Shelley's departure the following April, probably—from its place in Medwin's narrative—closer to the first than the last of these dates. Adonais was completed in June, 1821.

^{Note 80 in page 511} Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, pp. 182–183. The “infamy” mentioned in the first sentence refers to Southey's circulation of the story of Shelley's signing “Atheos” in the guest-book at Mont Anvert.

^{Note 81 in page 511} The comment “wound an already bleeding heart” may be an echo of Shelley's description of himself in the poem as one stabbed by a spear which “Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart Shook the weak hand that grasped it”—Adonais, 294–295.

^{Note 82 in page 511} Letter to Shelley, Aug. 30, 1821. Shelley and Mary, iii, 690.

^{Note 88 in page 511} Adonais, 415–417, 455–458.

^{Note 84 in page 511} Shelley may or may not have seen Southey's attack on him and Byron in the preface to The Vision of Judgment before writing Adonais. The following dates, however, seem rather suggestive: Shelley had heard of Keats's death (February 23) at least by April 16—when he wrote of it to Byron; but he probably did not begin Adonais until late in May or early in June—To John and Maria Gisborne, June 5, 1821, Julian Edition, x, 270. The Vision of Judgment was published on April 11, and so, if sent to Shelley, would have arrived sometime late in May. Byron, at any rate, had a copy, for by September 4 he had completed a reply to Southey, and he may well have sent on to Shelley a work in which they were linked as fellow villains.