A Storm on Parnassus

Robert Southeby, poet and critic, lives quietly with his wife and her two sisters in the Lake District. He is visited by Shelley, who at nineteen, is fiery and rebellious, with extreme views and an enthusiasm for Southeby's earlier work. All is amity until Shelley discovers in the Quarterly a poem by Southey in praise of George III. In anger he reviles his host as a renegade and a mercenary traitor and accuses him of seeking the Laureateship. Shelley is now unwilling to sit at Southeby's table, but he and his wife have come a long way through the snow and are very hungry and the idea of going back without their supper has its disadvantages.