Victor quotes Leigh Hunt's poem "The Story of Rimini," published in 1816--a poem Victor could not, of course, have known in the novel's fictional time frame that ends in summer 1799. Like the passage from Percy Shelley's "Mutability," this line from Hunt's poem belongs to the novel's extra-diagetic address to readers of 1818 rather than to canons of novelistic realism. Clerval is once again made an avatar of the Romantic poet that by 1818 had become solidly esconced in the British cultural imaginary.