A Satire upon Satire

S.’s substantial fragment on the uses of satire was first published, without title or date, in Edward Dowden's edition of The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles (1881; hereafter DC), pp. 383^*–84^*. Introducing the text, which he acknowledged had been supplied by Richard Garnett, Dowden accepted Garnett's identification of it (L about S 69) with an unfinished poem mentioned by S. in a letter of 25 January 1822 to Leigh Hunt:

I began once a Satire upon Satire, which I meant to be very severe,—it was full of small knives in the use of which practice would have soon made me very expert.

(L ii 383)