plenty of whiskey!' This is melancholy. Why should so beautiful a country be poor? Why can't craggy mountains, and granite rocks, bear corn, wine, and oil? These are our misfortunes,-these are what make me 'an eagle's talon in the waist.' But I am well repaid for my sufferings. We came out to endure, and to be gratified with scenery, and lo! we have not been disappointed either way. As for the oat-cakes, I was once in despair about them. I was not only too dainty, but they absolutely made me sick. With a little gulping, I can manage them now. Mr. Keats, however, is too unwell for fatigue and privation. I am waiting here to see him off in the smack for London.

He caught a violent cold in the Island of Mull, which, far from leaving him, has become worse, and the physician here thinks him too thin and fevered to proceed on our journey. It is a cruel disappointment. We have been as happy as possible together. Alas! I shall have to travel through Perthshire and all the counties round in solitude! But my disappointment is nothing to his; he not only loses my company (and that's a great loss), but he loses the country. Poor Charles Brown will have to trudge by himself,-an odd fellow, and moreover an odd figure; imagine me with a thick stick in my hand, the knapsack on my back, with spectacles on nose,' a white hat, a tartan coat and trousers, and a Highland plaid thrown over my shoulders! Don't laugh at me, there's a good fellow, although Mr. Keats calls me the Red Cross Knight, and declares my own shadow is ready to split its sides as it follows me. This dress is the best possible dress, as Dr. Pangloss would say. It is light and not easily penetrated by the wet, and when it is, it is not cold, it has little more than a kind of heavy smoky sensation about it.

I must not think of the wind, and the sun, and the rain, after our journey through the Island of Mull. There's a wild place! Thirty-seven miles of jumping and flinging over great stones along no path at all, up the steep and down the steep, and wading through rivulets up to the knees, and crossing a bog, a mile long, up to the ankles. I should like to give you a whole and particular account of the many, many wonderful places we have visited; but why should I ask a man to pay vigentiple postage? In one word then,—that is to the end of the letter,-let me tell you we have seen one-half of the lakes in Westmoreland and Cumberland,-we have travelled over the whole of the coast of Kirkcudbrightshire, and skudded over to Donaghadee. But we did not like Ireland, at least that part-and would go no farther than Belfast. So back came we in a whirligig, that is, in a hurry-and trotted up to Ayr, where we had the happiness of drinking whiskey in the very house that Burns was born in, and saw the banks of bonny Doon, and the brigs of Ayr, and Kirk Alloway,—we saw it all! After this we went to Glasgow, and then to Loch Lomond; but you can read all about that place in one of the fashionable guide-books. Then to Loch Awe, and down to the foot of it,-oh, what a glen we went through to get at it! At the top of the glen my Itinerary mentioned a place called 'Rest and be thankful,' nine miles off; now we had set out without breakfast, intending to take our meal there, when, horror and starvation! “Rest and be thankful" was not an inn, but a stone seat!

V.

COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY.

No IV.

OF KEATS,

THE MUSES' SON OF PROMISE, AND WHAT FEATS
HE YET MAY DO, &C.

CORNELIUS WEBB.

OF all the manias of this mad age, the most incurable, as well as the most common, seems to be no other than the Metromanie. The just celebrity of Robert Burns and Miss Baillie has had the melancholy effect of turning the heads of we know not how many farm-servants

It scarcely seems needful to weight or to soil a critical edition of Keats's writings with the whole mass of "Cockney School" articles; but the one article in Blackwood's Magazine specially devoted to the vilification of Keats himself is necessary to a full understanding of this particularly unpleasant episode in the literary history of the nineteenth century. This article, Number IV of the series on the Cockney School of Poetry, appeared in Blackwood's Magazine for August 1818. For those who care to dig further into an unseemly brawl of words it may be recorded here that Numbers I, II, and III, concerning Leigh Hunt, had appeared in the magazine for October 1817, November 1817, and July 1818, that Leigh Hunt had addressed the anonymous author of these attacks twice in The Examiner, that is to say on the 2nd of November 1817 very briefly, and at greater length on the 16th of the same month, and that in Blackwood's Magazine for January 1818 the anonymous author had replied with more scurrility, if possible, than ever, adding to the untruths he had already uttered the false denial that any of his previous statements had regarded Hunt's personal character.

and unmarried ladies; our very footmen compose tragedies, and there is scarcely a superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of lyrics behind her in her band-box. To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr John Keats. This young man appears to have received from nature talents of an excellent, perhaps even of a superior order-talents which, devoted to the purpose of any useful profession, must have rendered him a respectable, if not an eminent citizen. His friends, we understand, destined him to the career of medicine, and he was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady to which we have alluded. Whether Mr John had been sent home with a diuretic or composing draught to some patient far gone in the poetical mania, we have not heard. This much is certain, that he has caught the infection, and that thoroughly. For some time we were in hopes, that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The Phrenzy of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of "Endymion." We hope, however, that in so young a person, and with a constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable. Time, firm treatment, and rational restraint, do much for many apparently hopeless invalids; and if Mr Keats should happen, at some interval of reason, to cast his eye upon our pages, he may perhaps be convinced of the existence of his malady, which, in such cases, is often all that is

necessary to put the patient in a fair way of being cured.

The readers of the Examiner' newspaper were informed, some time ago, by a solemn paragraph, in Mr Hunt's best style, of the appearance of two new stars of glorious magnitude and splendour in the poetical horizon of the land of Cockaigne. One of these turned out, by and by, to be no other than Mr John Keats. This precocious adulation confirmed the wavering apprentice in his desire to quit the gallipots, and at the same time excited in his too susceptible mind a fatal admiration for the character and talents of the most worthless and affected of all the versifiers of our time. One of his first productions was the following sonnet, "written on the day when Mr Leigh Hunt left prison." It will be recollected, that the cause of Hunt's confinement was a series of libels against his sovereign, and that its fruit was the odious and incestuous "Story of Rimini.""

The absurdity of the thought in this sonnet is, however, if possible, surpassed in another, "addressed to Haydon" the painter, that clever, but most affected artist, who as little resembles Raphael in genius as he does in person, notwithstanding the foppery of having his hair curled over his shoulders in the old Italian fashion. In this exquisite piece it will be observed, that Mr Keats classes together WORDSWORTH, HUNT and HAYDON, as the three greatest spirits of the age, and that he alludes to himself, and some others of the rising brood of Cockneys, as likely to attain hereafter an

1 For the 1st of December 1816. See foot-note, page 331 of Volume I of this edition.

2 The writer here quotes in full the sonnet (for which see Volume I, pages 64-6), and goes through a little of the usual Wilsonian buffoonery of imported italics and notes of exclamation.