_Domestic conspiracy and legal oppression_, &c. The direct reference here is to the action taken by Shelley's father-in-law and sister-in-law, Mr. and Miss Westbrook, which resulted in the decree of Lord Chancellor Eldon whereby Shelley was deprived of the custody of the two children of his first marriage. See p. 12. _As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic._ Various writers have said something of this kind. I am not sure how far back the sentiment can be traced; but I presume that Shelley was not the first. Some readers will remember a passage in the dedication to his _Peter Bell the Third_ (1819), which forestalled Macaulay's famous phrase about the 'New Zealander on the ruins of London Bridge.' Shelley wrote: 'In the firm expectation that, when London shall be an habitation of bitterns;... when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream; some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing, in the scales of some new and unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians, I remain,' &c. _The offence of this poor victim seems to have consisted solely in his intimacy with Leigh Hunt_, &c. See the remarks on p. 45. There can be no doubt that Shelley was substantially correct in this opinion. Not only the _Quarterly Review_, of which he knew, but also _Blackwood's Magazine_, which did not come under his notice, abused Keats because he was personally acquainted with Hunt, and was, in one degree or another, a member of the literary coterie in which Hunt held a foremost place. And Hunt was in bad odour with these reviews because he was a hostile politician, still more than because of any actual or assumed defects in his performances as an ordinary man of letters. _Mr. Hazlitt._ William Hazlitt was (it need scarcely be said) a miscellaneous writer of much influence in these years, in politics an advanced Liberal. A selection of his writings was issued by Mr. William Ireland in 1889. Keats admired Hazlitt much more than Hunt. _I wrote to him, suggesting the propriety_, &c. See pp. 14, 15. _Cancelled Passages of Adonais_ (the poem). These passages also were in the first instance published in the _Shelley Relics_ of Dr. Garnett. They come, not from the same MS. which contains the prefatory fragments, but from some of Shelley's notebooks. +Stanza 1,+ 1. 1. _And the green paradise_, &c. The green paradise is the 'Emerald Isle'--Ireland. This stanza refers to Thomas Moore, and would have followed on after st. 30 in the body of the poem.