To ——[Lines to a Critic]

This lyric is drafted on pp. 342 rev. and 343 rev. of Nbk 15, where it is entitled ‘A Hate-Song’. Mary made a fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 under the title To ——. The rough state of the draft as well as a few substantive differences between it and the fair copy would indicate either that she transcribed from an intermediate fair copy made by S. or that he revised his draft while guiding her transcription from Nbk 15. In the draft, for example, the winter of l. 3 is cancelled and ‘frozen’ substituted for it, and the final word of draft l. 13 is ‘move’ not prove. The fair copy was later torn from Harvard Nbk 1 together with the fair copy of the irregular sonnet To — — [Lines to a Reviewer] and that of Song: To the Men of England, the latter occupying each of the other sides of the consecutive leaves on which the two shorter poems were copied. The two leaves in question are now in Box 1 where they are numbered ff. 75^{r —} 76^v. Both Lines to a Reviewer and the present poem were published by Leigh Hunt in 1823, so it is likely that the fair copies were torn from Harvard Nbk 1 in 1822 or 1823 to serve as press copy for Hunt. Lines to a Critic is the title under which this lyric appeared in the third number (April 1823) of The Liberal. Verse and Prose from the South (187–8), which was subsequently bound as the first number of The Liberal vol. ii. It is accompanied by the following editorial note, evidently by Hunt:

We have given the stupid malignity of the Investigator a better answer than it is worth already. The writers must lay it to the account of our infirmity, and to a lurking something of orthodoxy in us. But in these “Lines to a Critic”, the Reverend Calumniator, or Calumniators, will see what sort of an answer Mr. Shelley would have given them: for the beautiful effusion is his. Let the reader, when he has finished them, say which is the better Christian, — the “religious” reviver of bitter and repeated calumnies upon one who differs with him in opinion, or the “profane” philanthropist who can answer in such a spirit?

(187) Hunt’s remarks are aimed at The Investigator; or, Quarterly Magazine, edited by the Congregational ministers William Bengo’ Collyer and Thomas Raffles and by Raffles’ brother-in-law, the judge and writer on ecclesiastical law James Baldwin Brown. Hunt’s ‘better answer’ had already been delivered in the Advertisement to the second volume of The Liberal (v–vi) where he defended the journal from the numerous charges of irreligion and blasphemy levelled against it, throwing the accusations back upon those ‘divines’ who condemn all who find their notions of divinity too restricted. Already, in a review of Don Juan, The Investigator (vi (October 1821) 353–60) had set its face against the impiety of Byron and Shelley: ‘companions and fellow-workers in iniquity, (if to debauch the mind and deprave the heart, — if to destroy the surest safeguards of virtue here, — the only hopes of happiness hereafter, be iniquitous,) and fellow-candidates for the just recompense of such a prostitution of the noblest gift of heaven, in a future state of rewards and punishments, in which they are too enlightened to believe; though, with the devils, they shall believe, and tremble too’ (353). The profanity of Byron’s The Vision of Judgment is denounced in the next issue — xi (January 1823) 76–108 — in a review of the first number of The Liberal. The same issue delivers a censorious judgement on Shelley’s character and conduct by way of obituary notice (103–4). But Hunt will have had particularly in mind the furious vilification of Q Mab — published in 1821 by the radical bookseller William Clark in a pirated edition — in The Investigator x (October 1822), in an article entitled ‘Licentious Productions in High Life’, which also attacks several of Byron’s works as well as those of the diplomat and poet Sir Charles Hanbury Williams (1708–59). Passage after passage of Q Mab is paraded as the execrable and horrid blasphemy of an ‘impious wretch’, and S.’s sudden death by drowning is offered as a stroke of retributive justice authored by the Deity:

in the twinkling of an eye, the bark had disappeared, and the atheist had sunk to the bottom of a fathomless abyss, either to rot into annihilation there, or but to deposit the lifeless body for whose gratification he had lived, that his disencumbered spirit might rise to the judgement of its God. That judgement we presume not to pronounce; but this we may, and this we will undertake to say, that he stood not in his presence and before his throne, to utter the blasphemies he promulgated upon earth.

(367) S.’s life is then rehearsed as a series of vicious episodes: abandoning his wife to prostitution and suicide, seducing the daughter of a friend, living in an incestuous relationship with another of his daughters, for which actions he was righteously deprived of the custody of his children. Rejoicing that such a race of impiety and sin has now at last been run, the reviewer advises Byron and Hunt to take warning from the dire example of S.’s life and death (368).