Note 558 — THE VISION OF JUDGMENT. BY QUEVEDO REDIVIVUS.

["He has written Wat Tyler, and taken the office of poet laureate—he has, in the Life of Henry Kirke White (see Byron's note infra), denominated reviewing 'the ungentle craft,' and has become a reviewer—he was one of the projectors of a scheme called 'pantisocracy,' for having all things, including women, in common (query common women?)."—Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood's Magazine (No. xxix., August, 1819), Letters, 1900 [Appendix IX.], iv. 483. The invention or, possibly, disinterment of this calumny was no doubt a counterblast on Byron's part to the supposed charge of a "league of incest" (at Diodati, in 1816), which he maintained had been disseminated by Coleridge on the authority of Southey (vide ante, p. 475). It is, perhaps, unnecessary to state that before Pantisocracy was imagined or devised, one of the future pantisocrats, Robert Lovell, was married to Mary Fricker; that Robert Southey was engaged to be married to her sister Edith; and that, as a result of the birth and evolution of the scheme, Coleridge became engaged to be married to a third sister, Sarah, hitherto loverless, in order that "every Jack should have his Jill," and the world begin anew in a second Eden across the seas. All things were to be held in common, in order that each man might hold his wife in particular.]