words with which, in imitation of Mr. Leigh Hunt, he adorns our language.

"We are told that turtles passion their voices; that an arbour was nested, and a lady's locks gordianed up; and, to supply the place of the nouns thus verbalized, Mr. Keats, with great fecundity, spawns new ones, such as men-slugs and human serpentry, the honey-feel of bliss, wives prepare needments, and so forth.

"Then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads. Thus the wine out-sparkled, the multitude up-followed, and night up-took; the wind upblows, and the hours are down-sunken. But, if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs, he compensates the language with adverbs and adjectives which he separates from the parent stock. Thus a lady whispers pantingly and close, makes hushing signs, and steers her skiff into a ripply cove, a shower falls refreshfully, and a vulture has a spreaded tail.

"But enough of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte. If any one should be bold enough to purchase this 'Poetic Romance,' and so much more patient than ourselves as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success. We shall then return to the task which we now abandon in despair, and endeavour to make all due amends to Mr. Keats and to our readers."

Such is the too famous article in The Quarterly Review. If its contents are to be assessed with perfect calmness,

I should have to say that it is not mistaken in alleging that the poem of "Endymion" is rambling and indistinct; that Keats allowed himself to drift too readily according to the bidding of his rhymes (Leigh Hunt has acknowledged as much, in independent remarks of his own); that many words are coined, and badly coined; and that the versification is not free from blemishes-although several of the lines quoted by The Quarterly as unmetrical, are, when read with the right emphasis, blameless, or even sonorous. But the article is none the less a despicable and odious performance; partly as being a sneering depreciation of a work showing rich poetic endowment, and partly as being, not a deliberate and candid (however severe) estimate of Keats as a poet, but really an utterance of malice prepense, and hardly disguised, against Hunt as a hostile politician who wrote poetry, and against any one who consorted with him. The inverting of the due balance between the merits and the defects of Endymion," would have been at best an act of stupidity; at second best, after the author's preface had been laid to heart, an act of brutalism; and at worst, when the venom of abuse was poured into the poetic cup of Keats as an expedient for drugging the political cup of Hunt, an act of partisan turpitude. No more words need be wasted upon a proceeding of which the abiding and unevadeable literary record is graven in the brass of Shelley's "Adonais."

66

The attack in The Quarterly Review was accompanied by attacks in Blackwood's Magazine. If The Quarterly was carping and ill-natured, Blackwood was basely insulting. A series of articles "On the Cockney School of

Poetry" began in the Scotch magazine in October 1817, being directed mainly, and with calumnious virulence, against Leigh Hunt. No. 4 of the series came out in August 1818, and formed a vituperation of Keats. I will not draw upon its stores of underbred jocularity, so as to show that the best raillery which Blackwood could get up consisted of terming him Johnny Keats, and referring to his having been assistant to an "apothecary." The author of these papers signed himself Z, being no doubt too noble and courageous to traduce people without muffling himself in anonymity; nor did he consent to uncloak, though vigorously pressed by Hunt to do so. It is affirmed that. Z was Lockhart, the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, and afterwards editor of The Quarterly Review; and an unpleasant adjunct to this statement-we would gladly disbelieve it-is that Scott himself lent active aid in concocting the articles. A different account is that Z was at first John Wilson (Christopher North), revised by William Blackwood, but that the article on Keats was due to Lockhart.

Few literary questions of the last three-quarters of a century have been regarded from more absolutely different points of view than the problem-How did Keats receive the attacks made upon his poem and himself? From an early date in the controversy three points seem to have been very generally agreed upon : (1) That "Endymion" is (as Shelley judiciously phrased it), “a poem considerably defective;" (2) that the attacks upon were, in essence, partly true, but so biassed-so keen of scent after defects, and so dull of vision for beauties-as

it

to be practically unfair and perverse in a marked degree; and (3) that the unfairness and perversity quoad Keats were wilful devices of literary and especially of political spite quoad a knot of writers among whom Leigh Hunt was the central figure. The question remains-In what spirit did Keats meet his critics? Was he greatly distressed, or defiant and retaliatory, or substantially indifferent?

Among the documents of Keats's life I find few records strictly contemporary with the events themselves, serving to settle this point. When the abuse of Z against Hunt began, Keats was indignant and combative. He said in a letter which may belong to October 1817—

"There has been a flaming attack upon Hunt in the Edinburgh magazine. . . There has been but one number published-that on Hunt, to which they have prefixed a motto by one Cornelius Webb, 'Poetaster,' who unfortunately was one of our party occasionally at Hampstead, and took it into his head to write the following (something about)—

'We'll talk on Wordsworth, Byron,

A theme we never tire on,'

and so forth till he came to Hunt and Keats. In the motto they have put 'Hunt and Keats' in large letters. I have no doubt that the second number was intended for me, but have hopes of its non-appearance. don't mind the thing much; but, if he should go to such lengths with me as he has done with Hunt, I must infallibly call him to an account, if he be a human being,

and appears in squares and theatres where we might 'possibly meet.' I don't relish his abuse."

It is worth observing also that, in a paper "On Kean. as Richard Duke of York" which Keats published on December 28, 1817, he wrote: "The English people do not care one fig about Shakespeare, only as he flatters. their pride and their prejudices; . . . it is our firm opinion." If he thought that English indifference to Shakespeare was of this degree of density, he must surely have been prepared for a considerable amount of apathy in relation to any poem by John Keats.

On October 9, 1818, just after the spiteful notices of himself in Blackwood and The Quarterly had appeared, and had been replied to in The Morning Chronicle by two correspondents signing J. S. and R. B., Keats wrote: as follows to his publisher Mr. Hessey; and to treat the affair in a more self-possessed, measured, and dignified spirit, would not have been possible :

"You are very good in sending me the letters from The Chronicle, and I am very bad in not acknowledging such a kindness sooner; pray forgive me. It has so chanced that I have had that paper every day. I have seen to-day's. I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part. As for the rest, I begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakPraise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or The Quarterly could possibly inflict;

ness.