In a letter to Leigh Hunt, dated January 25, 1822, he says: "My faculties are shaken to atoms and torpid.
I can write nothing; and if "Adonais" had no success, and excited no interest, what incentive can I have to write ?" Again: "I write little now.

It is impossible to compose except under the strong excitement of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you write." Lord Byron's company proved now, as before, a check rather than an incentive to production: "I do not write; I have lived too long near Lord Byron, and the sun has extinguished the glow-worm; for I cannot hope, with St.
John, that THE LIGHT CAME INTO THE WORLD AND THE WORLD KNEW IT NOT." "I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may, and there is no other with whom it is worth contending." To Ollier, in 1820, he wrote: "I doubt whether I shall write more.

I could be content either with the hell or the paradise of poetry; but the torments of its purgatory vex me, without exciting my powers sufficiently to put an end to the vexation." It was not that his spirit was cowed by the Reviews, or that he mistook the sort of audience he had to address.

He more than once acknowledged that, while Byron wrote for the many, his poems were intended for the understanding few.

Yet the sunetoi, as he called them, gave him but scanty encouragement.