ABSTRACT
The Shelley's poem expresses a mood of grief, complicated and enriched by delight in the strange and half-unreal beauties of Italy. The poem gives Shelley's impressions of Byron and Venice, and it proves that he was able to record such impressions vividly and swiftly. The versification is very original and skilful. The sense overflows the couplets as in the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets, but it seldom rambles on or loses itself in helpless mazes after the manner of the Caroline heroic poems and 'Endymion'. The poem 'Julian and Maddalo', written, perhaps, between his two first visits to Venice, is an advance upon his earlier work. 'Mazenghi' is the beginning of a story of a Florentine exile. In December, 1819, Shelley began a prose work, called 'A Philosophical View of Reform'. Shelley saw that England was in danger of falling under the tyranny of a plutocracy. The National Debt seemed to him the great symbol of that tyranny.
