"Thou great God, Whose image upon earth a father is, Dost thou indeed abandon me?" And when she is asked: "Art thou not guilty of thy father's death?" She answers: "Or wilt thou rather tax high-judging God That he permitted such an act as that Which I have suffered, and which he beheld; Made it unutterable, and took from it All refuge, all revenge, all consequence, But that which thou hast called my father's death?" In the torture chamber she says: "My pangs are of the mind and of the heart And of the soul: ay, of the inmost soul, Which weeps within tears as of burning gall To see, in this ill world where none are true, My kindred false to their deserted selves; And with considering all the wretched life Which I have lived, and its now wretched end; And the small justice shown by Heaven and Earth To me or mine; and what a tyrant thou art, And what slaves these; and what a world we make, The oppressor and the oppressed." It is plain that what specially attracted Shelley in Beatrice's character was its combination of energy and gentleness. When the hour of death has come, a horror seizes her at the thought that after death she may meet her father again. She cries: "If there should be No God, no heaven, no earth, in the void world, The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world! If all things then should be my father's spirit, His eye, his voice, his touch, surrounding me, The atmosphere and breath of my dead life! If sometimes, as a shape more like himself, Even the form which tortured me on earth, Masked in grey hairs and wrinkles, he should come, And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down! For was he not alone _omnipotent_ On earth, and ever present? Even though dead Does not his spirit live in all that breathe, And work for me and mine still the same ruin, Scorn, pain, despair? Who ever yet returned To teach the laws of Death's untrodden realm? Unjust perhaps as those which drive us now, Oh whither, whither?" It was of this, the most mature and best planned of Shelley's works, that the _Literary Gazette_ wrote: "_The Cenci_ is the most abominable work of the time, and seems to be the production of some fiend." The reviewer hopes never again to see a book "so stamped with pollution, impiousness, and infamy." The hostility evinced depressed Shelley, who thought that this time he had done his best. He was not intimidated by it, but his desire to produce became less strong. During the last two years of his life no long works came from his pen. In November 1820 he writes: "The reception the public have given me might go far to damp any man's enthusiasm." His last letters are full of remarks on the criticism meted out to him.