ABSTRACT
Difficult to date, but perhaps drafted in the first week of July 1818, possibly at about the same time as the preceding sonnet 'Lift not the painted veil'. The two pieces are three pages apart in Nbk 11. Mary S's inclusion of the lines in her notes to the Poems of 1820 does not imply their assignation to that date, but was to illustrate S's reaction to the personal abuse of reviewers: That he felt these things deeply cannot be doubted, though he armed himself with the consciousness of acting from a lofty and heroic sense of right'. The ills deplored are not loss or grief, his daughter's death caused in September, but neglect, mockery, and hatred S did not read the scurrilous article on Leigh Hunt's Foliage in the Quarterly Review xviii, which contained covert attacks on himself, until August or September, but he had been told of it, and Peacock in a letter to S.
