From Italy Shelley wrote to Peacock: "I most devoutly wish I were living near London.... My inclination points to Hampstead; but I do not know whether I should not make up my mind to something more completely suburban. What are mountains, trees, heaths, or even glorious and ever beautiful sky, with such sunsets as I have seen at Hampstead, to friends? Social enjoyment, in some form or other, is the Alpha and the Omega of existence. All that I see in Italy--and from my tower window I now see the magnificent peaks of the Apennine half enclosing the plain--is nothing. It dwindles into smoke in the mind, when I think of some familiar forms of scenery, little perhaps in themselves, over which old remembrances have thrown a delightful colour."[516] The attacks of the _Quarterly_ of May, 1818, on Shelley's private life and of April, 1819, on the _Revolt of Islam_, and the reply of _The Examiner_, have already been discussed on p. 77 of the third chapter. The assault was renewed in October, 1821. The dominating characteristic of Shelley's poetry is said to be "its frequent and total want of meaning." In _Prometheus Unbound_ there were said to be many absurdities "in defiance of common sense and even of grammar ... a mere jumble of words and heterogeneous ideas, connected by slight and accidental associations, among which it is impossible to distinguish the principal object from the accessory." The poem is declared to be full of "flagrant offences against morality and religion" and the poet to have gone out of his way to "revile Christianity and its author." As a final verdict the reviewer says: "Mr. Shelley's poetry is, in sober sadness, _drivelling prose run mad_.... Be his private qualities what they may, his poems ... are at war with reason, with taste, with virtue, in short, with all that dignifies man, or that man reveres." The _London Literary Gazette_ joined its forces to the _Quarterly_ and scored _Prometheus Unbound_ in 1820, _Queen Mab_ in 1821. _The Examiner_ of June 16, 23 and July 7, 1822, contained Hunt's answer to the two onslaughts. He accused the writer in the _Quarterly_ of having used six stars to indicate an omission, in order to imply that the name of Christ had been blasphemously used; of having put quotation marks to sentences not in the author criticised and of having intentionally left out so much at times as to make the context seem absurd. At the same time Hunt stated that he agreed that Shelley's poetry was of "too abstract and metaphysical a cast ... too wilful and gratuitous in its metaphors"; and that it would have been better if he had kept metaphysics and polemics out of poetry. But at the same time he asserted that Shelley had written much that was unmetaphysical and poetically beautiful, as _The Cenci_, the _Ode to a Skylark_ and _Adonais_. Of the second he wrote: "I know of nothing more beautiful than this,--more choice of tones, more natural in words,