The Mask of Anarchy was composed in the fall of 1819, soon after the Manchester riot of that summer. The Manchester or Peterloo Massacre,' as it was called, was occasioned by an attempt to hold a mass meeting on August 9, 1819, at St. Peter's Field, Manchester, in behalf of parliamentary reform. It was declared illegal and forbidden by the magistrates, and was in consequence postponed. It was held August 16, and attended by several thousands. The chief constable was ordered to arrest the ringleaders, and in particular the chairman, Henry Hunt, an agitator unconnected with Leigh Hunt. He asked

military aid, and went accompanied by forty cavalrymen; on the failure of the officer and his escort to penetrate the crowd which surrounded them, orders were given three hundred hussars to disperse the people; in the charge six persons were killed, twenty or thirty received sabre wounds, and fifty or more were injured in other ways. Eldon was Lord High Chancellor, Sidmouth, Home Secretary, and Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary; the government supported the authorities and publicly approved their conduct. News of these events reached Shelley while still residing at the Villa Valsovano, near Leghorn, and employed in

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revising The Cenci, and roused in him,' says Mrs. Shelley, violent emotions of indignation and compassion.' The nature of these emotions is shown in the letter he wrote to Ollier, from whom he heard of the affair: The same day that your letter came, came the news of the Manchester work, and the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins. I wait anxiously to hear how the country will express its sense of this bloody, murderous oppression of its destroyers. "Something must be done. What, yet I know not."' In a similar vein he addressed Peacock, who had forwarded newspaper accounts: 'Many thanks for your attention in sending the papers which contain the terrible and important news of Manchester. These are, as it were, the distant thunders of the terrible storm which is approaching. The tyrants here, as in the French Revolution, have first shed blood. May their execrable lessons not be learned with equal docility! I still think there will be no coming to close quarters until financial affairs bring the oppressors and the oppressed together. Pray let me have the earliest political news which you consider of importance at this crisis.'

Shelley sent the poem to Leigh Hunt to be published in The Examiner, but it did not appear. He wrote to Hunt on the subject in November.

'You do not tell me whether you have received my lines on the Manchester affair. They are of the exoteric species, and are meant, not for the Indicator, but the Examiner. . . The great thing to do is to hold the balance between popular impatience and tyrannical obstinacy; to inculcate with fervor both the right of resistance and the duty of forbearance. You know my principles incite me to take all the good I can get in politics, forever aspiring to something more. I am one of those whom nothing will fully satisfy, but who are ready to be partially satisfied by all that is practicable. We shall see.'

The poem was at last issued, under Hunt's editorship, in 1832. He assigns, in his preface, as the reason for his failure to publish it when it was written, his own belief that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kindheartedness of his spirit, that walked in the flaming robe of verse.'