To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]

There is a holograph fair copy of these four stanzas—legible but with little punctuation—entitled To S.& C., in Nbk 11 (pp. 60–1). They were probably then directly transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1 by either S. or Mary: her list of Contents shows the title To Sxxxxxth and Cxxxxxxxxgh as occupying the missing page 38, between MA and Exxxxxd (apparently England in 1819); both of these fair copies have also been removed from the nbk. The stanzas were first published in The Athenaeum for 25 August 1832 (554–5), in one of the series of articles that comprise Thomas Medwin's ‘Memoir of Shelley’, under the title Similes and preceded by a note:

Shelley had at command the same weapons which Byron used but he disdained the arm of satire, and treated his critics with a noble scorn; he says to one of them— The grass may grow in wintry weather As soon as hate in me.

… that Shelley could wield a lash of bronze for others, he proved in Adonais, and not excepting even the strongest lines of our English Juvenal, Churchill, perhaps the stanzas on Keat's [sic] Reviewer cut nearer to the bone than any in our language. Among the few satirical poems he wrote, was one on the Court of Chancery, on being robbed of his children; but, great as his wrongs were, even this he never published, though it should have found a place among his posthumous works. This satire was an abstraction, but of awful power. Another I will give on two politicians, of whom Lord Castlereagh, whom he used to call πυργοαναξ, [Purganax; see OT (no. 344) Dramatis Personae], was one.