ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, IX, 18 February 1816, pp. 97–9. Wordsworth published the three sonnets Hunt quotes and discusses in John Scott’s Champion (4 February 1816). Carl H. Ketcham indicates, in his Shorter Poems, 1807–1820 by William Wordsworth (Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1989), pp. 533–4, that all three were composed by 18 January 1816 (the date of official thanksgiving for Waterloo, which was the occasion for Wordsworth’s controversial ‘Thanksgiving Ode’); they were sent to Scott on 29 January. As Wordsworth seems to have begun these poems in November 1815, they were written at a time when, if not he himself, then at least his wife and sisters were reading Hunt’s poem on Napoleon’s first abdication, The Descent of Liberty (letter of 13 January 1816, The Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1806–1820, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969–70) vol. ii, p. 273).
