‘Sir,
‘The delay which occurred in our reply to you respecting the poem you have obligingly offered us for publication, has arisen from our literary friends and advisers (at least such as we have confidence in) being in the country at this season, as is usual, and the time they have bestowed on its perusal.
‘We are extremely sorry, at length, after the most mature deliberation, to be under the necessity of declining the honour of being the publishers of the present poem;—not that we doubt its success, but that it is, perhaps, better suited to the character and liberal feelings of the English, than the bigoted spirit which yet pervades many cultivated minds in this country. Even Walter Scott is assailed on all hands at present by our Scotch spiritual, and Evangelical magazines, and instructors, for having promulgated atheistical doctrines in the Lady of the Lake.
‘We beg you will have the goodness to advise us how it should be returned, and we think its being consigned to the care of some person in London would be more likely to ensure its safety than addressing it to Horsham.
‘We are, Sir, your most obedient humble servants,
‘John Ballantyne & Co.’
The religious sentiments, which the publishers thought less likely to offend English than Scotch readers, were probably the same ‘opinions on religion, whose inconsequence’ Medwin declares to be a sufficient indication that the poem was the composition of two different writers. That the publishers had reason to think these sentiments little adapted to the feelings of their fellow-countrymen of North Britain will appear probable to readers who recall the part played by Ahasuerus in Queen Mab,—a poem that resembled the poem of The Wandering Jew in containing passages that were the direct offspring of the memorable fragment.
Medwin says that on their completion, Shelley sent the seven or eight cantos ‘to Campbell for his opinion on their merits, with a view to publication,’ and that the author of the Pleasures of Hope returned the MS. with the remark that there were only two good lines in it:—
‘It seemed as if an angel’s sigh
Had breathed the plaintive symphony,’
lines, by the way (Medwin adds), ‘savouring strongly of Walter Scott.’ The peculiarities of Mr. Medwin’s habitual inexactness countenance the suspicion that, though the poem came under Campbell’s critical consideration through Shelley’s act, the author of the Pleasures of Hope would not have seen it had he not been the particular literary friend and adviser, whose ‘opinion’ determined John Ballantyne and Co. not to publish the work. Anyhow, Campbell read and condemned the poem which the publishers declined,—the poem which Shelley (on receiving the letter of 24th September, 1810, from the Edinburgh publishers) lost no time in offering to John Joseph Stockdale, the Pall Mall (London) publisher, whose dealings with the poet and the poet’s father were laid before the public in Stockdale’s Budget (1827).
In one of the several puerile letters, whose style affords conclusive testimony that he was not the author of the A.M. Oxon. letter, Shelley wrote to Stockdale from Field Place on 28th September, 1810 (just a month before he went into ‘residence’ at Oxford):