ABSTRACT
[Hazlitt] Liber Amoris (1823); review by? Albany Fonblanque, Examiner, May 11, 1823, pp. 313–315. If Fonblanque was, indeed, the “Q” of these late Examiner reviews, as P.P. Howe asserts in his life of Hazlitt, this review is especially important. For it seems likely that Fonblanque was also the “F” of Liber Amoris itself – a participant in Hazlitt’s love-drama, as well as reviewer of the resultant book. The most remarkable aspect of this review, then, is Fonblanque’s effort to preserve the fiction that the anonymous author was a Scot who had recently died in the Netherlands. Sir William Drummond’s Academical Questions (1805) was a skeptical philosophical treatise that exerted great influence on Shelley’s thought (see C.E. Pulos, The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Scepticism). Byron uses the devil Asmodus (p. 314) in A Vision of Judgment.
