years
old, with the object of procuring Catholic emancipation and the repeal
of the Union Act--subjects on which he was quite ignorant. He addressed
meetings, wasted money, and distributed two pamphlets "consisting of
the benevolent and tolerant deductions of philosophy reduced into the
simplest language." Later on, when he had left England for ever, he
still followed eagerly the details of the struggle for freedom at home,
and in 1819 composed a group of poems designed to stir the masses from
their lethargy. Lord Liverpool's administration was in office, with
Sidmouth as Home Secretary and Castlereagh as Foreign Secretary, a pair
whom he thus pillories:

"As a shark and dog-fish wait
Under an Atlantic Isle,
For the negro ship, whose freight
Is the theme of their debate,
Wrinkling their red gills the while--

Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,
Two scorpions under one wet stone,
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,
Two crows perched on the murrained cattle,
Two vipers tangled into one."

The most effective of these bitter poems is 'The Masque of Anarchy',
called forth by the "Peterloo Massacre" at Manchester on August 16,
1819, when hussars had charged a peaceable meeting held in support
of Parliamentary reform, killing six people and wounding some seventy
others. Shelley's frenzy of indignation poured itself out in the
terrific stanzas, written in simplest language so as to be understood by
the people, which tell how

"I met a murder on the way--
He had a mask like Castlereagh--
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him."

The same year and mood produced the great sonnet, 'England in 1819'--

"An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring."

and to the same group belongs that not quite successful essay in
sinister humour, 'Swellfoot the Tyrant' (1820), suggested by the
grunting of pigs at an Italian fair, and burlesquing the quarrel between
the Prince Regent and his wife. When the Princess of Wales (Caroline of
Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel), after having left her husband and perambulated
Europe with a paramour, returned, soon after the Prince's accession as
George IV, to claim her position as Queen, the royal differences became
an affair of high national importance. The divorce case which followed