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 Dramatis Personae (Longman iii 658)], was one.

(For the lines quoted, see To — [Lines to a Critic] 3–4; the poem ‘on the Court of Chancery’ is To —— [the Lord Chancellor]). Both poem and note were republished the following year in Medwin (1833) 125–6. Mary included the stanzas in 1839 (iii 189–90) in a text that reads hue for yew in l. 7 but is otherwise identical to Medwin’s save for minor differences of punctuation. In 1840 (247), she expanded the title to Similes, For Two Political Characters of 1819. The differences between S.’s Nbk 11 holograph and both 1839 and Athenaeum 1832 in ll. 1, 2, 3, 7 (see notes below) might represent alterations made by S. in the missing Harvard Nbk 1 fair copy, though they hardly count as improvements. Morn (1839/Athenaeum 1832) for moon (Nbk 11) in l. 9 must be a mistranscription; however, the word is not perfectly formed in Nbk 11 and so is susceptible to misreading. 1839’s hue for yew (Nbk 11/Athenaeum 1832) would seem to be a mistranscription or compositorial error caused by aural similarity. It remains possible that it was the missing Harvard Nbk 1 fair copy that served as press-copy for both Medwin’s text and 1839; Mary may even have removed the leaf in question from Harvard Nbk 1 and sent it to the press. But it may also be that, as the leaf was missing, she based her text on Athenaeum 1832 just as she adopted its title. In one case, as in the other, it is not clear why she did not make use of the Nbk 11 holograph, unless she was unaware of it or had forgotten that it was there.