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.

_I wrote to him, suggesting the propriety_, &c. See pp. 14, 15.

_Cancelled Passages of Adonais_ (the poem). These passages also were in
the first instance published in the _Shelley Relics_ of Dr. Garnett.
They come,