Verse criticism
While I'm sure that some of us have, on occasion, written grumpy comments in the margins or on the endpapers of our books, I suspect that we normally don't do so in verse. I've just acquired a bound collection of fifteen pamphlets on the Catholic Emancipation Act, which includes the following lines, written on an otherwise blank sheet:
Ah! truth thou'rt a nominal thing
Thy footsteps on earth are unknown
Thy semblance has nought but a sling
Thy light unto darkness is grown
The logic contain'd in this book
Is such as in Bedlam we find
T'is faulty wherever we look
And shows a distempered mind
It's not clear which pamphlet aroused the writer's ire. The pamphlet immediately following this insert, by the Rev. James Mitchell, is annotated, but in a different hand; since the annotations are proofreader's corrections, the hand in question may well be Mitchell's.