ABSTRACT
Written December 1817/January 1818. In Nbk 5 the lines follow parts of the prose draft for A Refutation of Deism (1814), but are followed after two pages by the ‘Essay on Christianity’, which is datable to late 1817/early 1818, and all the other contents of the nbk belong to the same period. S. was reading the opening Books of Paradise Lost late in December 1817 after revising L&C for republication (Mary Jnl i 188-9), which might account for the Miltonic style of these lines and for their semi-parody of Paradise Lost iii. It is also possible, as Locock surmised (Locock 1911 ii 498), that they represent an abortive start of S.’s projected poem on Job. Mary S. says in her note on PU that at the time of their removal to Italy S. ‘meditated
