Seven blood-hounds followed him."

The same year and mood produced the great sonnet, 'England in
1819'--

"An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring."

and to the same group belongs that not quite successful essay
in sinister humour, 'Swellfoot the Tyrant' (1820), suggested by
the grunting of pigs at an Italian fair, and burlesquing the
quarrel between the Prince Regent and his wife. When the
Princess of Wales (Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel), after
having left her husband and perambulated Europe with a
paramour, returned, soon after the Prince's accession as George
IV, to claim her position as Queen, the royal differences
became an affair of high national importance. The divorce case
which followed 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