on the whole I am happier than when I have time to be glum : perhaps it may cure me. Immediately on my return I shall begin studying hard, with a peep at the theatre now and then. I have a slight sore throat, and think it better to stay a day or two at Oban then we shall proceed to Fort William and Inverness. Brown, in his letters, puts down every little circumstance; I should like to do the same, but I confess myself too indolent, and besides, next winter they will come up in prime order as we speak of such and such things. Remember me to all, including Mr. and Mrs. Bentley. JOHN. From Fort William Keats mounted Ben Nevis. When on the summit a cloud enveloped him, and sitting on the stones, as it slowly wafted away, showing a tremendous precipice into the valley below, he wrote these lines:: Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud I look into the chasms, and a shroud Is mist and crag, not only on this height, But in the world of thought and mental might! To Mrs. Wylie, the mother of his sister-in-law. MY DEAR MADAM, INVERNESS, August 6, [1818.] It was a great regret to me that I should leave all my friends, just at the moment when I might have helped to soften away the time for them. I wanted not to leave my brother Tom, but more especially, believe me, I should like to have remained near you, were it but for an atom of consolation after parting with so dear a daughter. My brother George has ever been more than a brother to me; he has been my greatest friend, and I can never forget the sacrifice you have made for his happiness. As I walk along the mountains here I am full of these things, and lay in wait, as it were, for the pleasure of seeing you immediately on my return to town. I wish, above all things, to say a word of comfort to you, but I know not how. It is impossible to prove that black is white; it is impossible to make out that sorrow is joy, or joy is sorrow. : Tom tells me that you called on Mrs. Haslam, with a newspaper giving an account of a gentleman in a fur,cap, falling over a precipice in Kircudbrightshire. If it was me, I did it in a dream, or in some magic interval between the first and second cup of tea; which is nothing extraordinary when we hear that Mahomet, in getting out of bed, upset a jug of water, and whilst it was falling, took a fortnight's trip, as it seemed, to Heaven; yet was back in time to save one drop of water being spilt. As for fur caps, I do not remember one beside my own, except at Carlisle this was a very good fur cap I met in High-street, and I dare say was the unfortunate one. I dare say that the Fates, seeing but two fur caps in the north, thought it too extraordinary, and so threw the dies which of them should be drowned. The lot fell upon Jones: I dare say his name was Jones. All I hope is that the gaunt ladies said not a word about hanging; if they did I shall repeat that I was not half-drowned in Kircudbright. Stop! let me see !—being half-drowned by falling from a precipice, is a very romantic affair: why should I not take it to myself? How glorious to be introduced in a drawing-room to a lady who reads novels, with "Mr. So-and-so-Miss So-and-so; Miss So-and-so, this is Mr. So-and-so, who fell off a precipice and was halfdrowned." Now I refer to you, whether I should lose so fine an opportunity of making my fortune. No romance lady could resist me-none. Being run under a wagon; side-lamed in a playhouse; apoplectic through brandy; and a thousand other tolerably decent things for badness, would be nothing; but being tumbled over a precipice into the sea-oh! it would make my fortune especially if you could continue to hint, from this bulletin's authority, that I was not upset on my own account, but that I dashed into the waves after Jessy of Dumblane, and pulled her out by the hair;—but that, alas! she was dead, or she would have made me happy with her hand. However, in this you may use your own discretion. But I must leave joking, and seriously aver, that I have been very romantic indeed among these mountains and lakes. I have got wet through, day after day; eaten oat-cake, and drank whisky; walked up to my knees in bog; got a sore throat; gone to see Icolmkill and Staffa; met with unwholesome food, just here and there, as it happened; went up Ben Nevis, and-N. B., came down again: sometimes, when I am rather tired, I lean rather languishingly on a rock, and long for some famous beauty to get down from her palfrey in passing, approach me, with her saddle-bags, and give me—a dozen or two capital roast-beef sandwiches. When I come into a large town, you know there is no putting one's knapsack into one's fob, so the people stare. We have been taken for spectacle-venders, razor-sellers, jewelers, traveling linen-drapers, spies, excisemen, and many things I have no idea of. When I asked for letters at Port Patrick, the man asked,—What regiment? I have had a peep also at Little Ireland. Tell Henry I have not camped quite on the bare earth, yet, but nearly as bad, in walking through Mull; for the shepherds' huts you can scarcely breathe in for the smoke, which they seem to endeavor to preserve for smoking on a large scale. I assure you, my dear Madam, that one of the greatest pleasures I shall have on my return, will be seeing you, and that I shall ever be Yours, with the greatest respect and sincerity, JOHN KEATS. It was Keats's intention to return by Edinburgh; but, on arriving at Inverness, the inflammation in his throat, brought on by the accidents and inconvenience of travel, caused him, at his friend's solicitation, to return at once to London. Some mutual friend had forwarded him an invitation from Messrs. Blackwood, injudiciously adding the suggestion, that it would be very advisa ble for him to visit the Modern Athens, and endeavor to conciliate his literary enemies in that quarter. The sensibility and moral dignity of Keats were outraged by this proposal: it may be imagined what answer he returned, and also that this circumstance may not have been unconnected with the article on him which appeared in the August number of the "Edinburgh Magazine, as part of a series that had commenced the previous year, and concerning which he had already expressed himself freely. Outside sheet of a letter to Mr. Bailey. "There has been a flaming attack upon Hunt in the Edinburgh Magazine.' I never read any thing so virulent-accusing him of the greatest crimes, depreciating his wife, his poetry, his habits, his company, his conversation. These philippics are to come ont in numbers-called, 'The Cockney School of Poetry.' There has been but one number published-that on Hunt-to which they have prefixed a motto from one Cornelius Webb, 'Poetaster'-who, unfortunately, was 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 comes 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, from the following advertisement in last Sunday's Examiner' To Z. The writer of the article signed Z, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, for October, 1817, is invited to send his address to the printer of the Examiner, in order that justice may be executed on the proper person.' I 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 account, if he be a human being, and appears in squares and theatres, where we might possibly meet."" 6 Keats's first volume had been inscribed to Leigh Hunt, and contained an ardent and affectionate Sonnet, written "on the day when Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison." It was therefore at once as sumed by the critics that Keats was not only a bad poet, but a bad citizen. At this time literary criticism had assumed an unusually political complexion. The triumph of the advocates of established rights and enforced order, over all the hopes and dreams that the French Revolution had generated, was complete, and it was accompanied with the insolence of men whose cause had little in it to move the higher impulses of our nature. Proud of the overthrow of that fatal ambition, which had turned into the gall of selfishness all the wholesome sympathy of a liberated nation for the wrongs of others, and rejoicing in the pacification of Europe, they cared little for the preservation of national liberties from arbitrary power, or for the extirpation of those abuses and that injustice, which had first provoked the contest and would surely lead to its renewal, if tolerated or sustained. It was, perhaps, too much to expect a recognition of what the French Revolution had done for the mind of man, from those who had spent their blood and treasure in resisting its immediate consequences, and some intolerance was to be forgiven in those who, when conjured in the name of Liberty, could point to the system of Napoleon, or in that of Humanity, to the "Reign of Terror." The pious Wordsworth and the politic Southey, who had hailed the day-star with songs of triumph, had fled affrighted from its bloody noon, and few persons of generous temper and honest purpose remained, whose imagination had not been tamed down before the terrible realities, or whose moral sense had not been shocked into despair. Among these, however, were the men of letters, who were designated, in ridicule, "The Cockney School." The epithet had so much meaning as consisted in some of the leaders being Londoners, and engaged in the editorship of the public press of the metropolis. The strong and immediate contrasts between town and country, seemed also to have the effect of rendering many of these writers insensible to that discrimination of the relative worth and importance of natural objects, which habit and taste requires, but which reason cannot strictly define. It is perfectly true that a blade of grass is, to the reverential observer, as great a miracle of divine workmanship as the solar system—that the valves of an unseemly shell may have, to the physiologist, all |