Cancelled Passages of Adonais, Preface. These are taken from Dr. Garnett’s Relics of Shelley, published in 1862.  He says:  ’Among Shelley’s MSS. is a fair copy of the Defence of Poetry, apparently damaged by sea-water, and illegible in many places.  Being prepared for the printer, it is written on one side of the paper only:  on the blank pages, but frequently undecipherable for the reason just indicated, are many passages intended for, but eventually omitted from, the preface to Adonais.’

I have employed my poetical compositions and publications simply as the instruments of that sympathy between myself and others which the ardent and unbounded love I cherished for my kind incited me to acquire. This is an important indication of the spirit in which Shelley wrote, and consequently of that in which his reader should construe his writings.  He poured out his full heart, craving for ‘sympathy.’  Loving mankind, he wished to find some love in response.

Domestic conspiracy and legal oppression, &c.  The direct reference here is to the action taken by Shelley’s father-in-law and sister-in-law, Mr. and Miss Westbrook, which resulted in the decree of Lord Chancellor Eldon whereby Shelley was deprived of the custody of the two children of his first marriage.  See p. 12. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic. Various writers have said something of this kind.  I am not sure how far back the sentiment can be traced; but I presume that Shelley was not the first.  Some readers will remember a passage in the dedication to his Peter Bell the Third (1819), which forestalled Macaulay’s famous phrase about the ‘New Zealander on the ruins of London Bridge.’  Shelley wrote:  ’In the firm expectation that, when London shall be an habitation of bitterns;... when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream; some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing, in the scales of some new and unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians, I remain,’ &c.

The offence of this poor victim seems to have consisted solely in his intimacy with Leigh Hunt, &c.  See the remarks on p. 45.  There can be no doubt that Shelley was substantially correct in this opinion.  Not only the Quarterly Review, of which he knew, but also Blackwood’s Magazine, which did not come under his notice, abused Keats because he was personally acquainted with Hunt, and was, in one degree or another, a member of the literary coterie in which Hunt held a foremost place.  And Hunt was in bad odour with these reviews because he was a hostile politician, still more than because of any actual or assumed defects in his performances as an ordinary man of letters.

Mr. Hazlitt. William Hazlitt was (it need scarcely be said) a miscellaneous writer of much influence in these years, in politics an advanced Liberal.  A selection of his writings was issued by Mr. William Ireland in 1889.  Keats admired Hazlitt much more than Hunt.