The Quarterly Review, and Revolt of Islam [Concluded from last week.]

First published in The Examiner, XII, 10 October 1819, pp. 652–3. It was reprinted in Reiman, Part C, vol. i, pp. 447–8. This article completes Hunt’s three-part response to The Quarterly Review’s attack on Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam. For the beginning of this series and background information on its origin, see headnote above, pp. 214–15. Having defended Shelley’s moral philosophy while indicting the hypocrisy of his detractors in the previous two instalments of this review, Hunt now turns to the Quarterly’s malicious tirades against Shelley’s private life. Again, in his engagement with questions about representing the truth in print, Hunt persists in his campaign to advance the spirit of knowledge as it ‘awake[ns]’ and spreads its ‘earth-thrilling limbs’ to crush the guardians of falsehood and old tyranny (see above, p. 175).