“Hobhouse says you’ve brought back another book,” said he, presently.
“I’ve a portmanteau crammed with stanzas in Spenser’s measure, but they’re likely to be drivelling idiotism. I must leave that to the critics. I have heard their chorus of deep damnations once,” Gordon added ruefully. “But no doubt they’ve long ago forgotten my infantile ferocities.”
Sheridan shot a keen glance under his bushy brows. Could the other, he wondered, have so undervalued the vicious hatred his cutting Satire had raised in the ranks of the prigs and pamphleteers it pilloried? In his long foreign absence had he been ignorant of the flood of tales so assiduously circulated in the London newspapers and magazines?
His thought snapped. Gordon had halted before a book-shop which bore the sign of “The Juvenile Library,” his eye caught by printed words on a pasteboard placard hung in its window.
“Sherry!” he cried, his color changing prismatically. “Look there!”
The sign read:
“Queen Mab.”
For writing the which Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Stands lately expelled from University College, Oxford.
2s, 6d.
Also