was like a gangrenous eruption symptomatic of the distempers of the age.
Shelley felt that sort of disgust which makes a man rave and curse under
the attacks of some loathsome disease; if he laughs, it is the laugh of
frenzy. In the slight Aristophanic drama of 'Swellfoot', which was
sent home, published, and at once suppressed, he represents the men of
England as starving pigs content to lap up such diluted hog's-wash as
their tyrant, the priests, and the soldiers will allow them. At the end,
when the pigs, rollicking after the triumphant Princess, hunt down their
oppressors, we cannot help feeling a little sorry that he does not glide
from the insistent note of piggishness into some gentler mood: their is
a rasping quality in his humour, even though it is always on the side of
right. He wrote one good satire though. This is 'Peter Bell the Third'
(1819), an attack on Wordsworth, partly literary for the dulness of
his writing since he had been sunk in clerical respectability, partly
political for his renegade flunkyism.

In 1820 the pall which still hung over northern Europe began to lift in
the south. After Napoleon's downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814-16)
had parcelled Europe out on the principle of disregarding national
aspirations and restoring the legitimate rulers. This system,
which could not last, was first shaken by revolutions that set up
constitutional governments in Spain and Naples. Shelley hailed these
streaks of dawn with joy, and uttered his enthusiasm in two odes--the
'Ode to Liberty' and the 'Ode to Naples'--the most splendid of those
cries of hope and prophecy with which a long line of English poets has
encouraged the insurrection of the nations. Such cries, however, have no
visible effect on the course of events. Byron's jingles could change the
face of the world, while all Shelley's pure and lofty aspirations left
no mark on history. And so it was, not with his republican ardours
alone, but with all he undertook. Nothing he did influenced his
contemporaries outside his immediate circle; the public only noticed him
to execrate the atheist, the fiend, and the monster. He felt that "his
name was writ on water," and languished for want of recognition. His
life, a lightning-flash across the storm-cloud of the age, was a brief
but crowded record of mistakes and disasters, the classical example of
the rule that genius is an infinite capacity for getting into trouble.

Though poets must "learn in suffer