a certain degree of talent which deserves to be put in the right way, or which at least ought to be warned of the wrong; and if finally he had not told us that he is of an age and temper which imperiously require mental discipline.

"Of the story we have been able to make out but little. It seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion; but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we cannot speak with any degree of certainty, and must therefore content ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and versification. And here again we are perplexed and puzzled. At first it appeared to us that Mr. Keats had been amusing himself and wearying his readers with an immeasurable game at bouts rimés; but, if we recollect rightly, it is an indispensable condition at this play that the rhymes, when filled up, shall have a meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows, not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds; and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn.

"We shall select, not as the most striking instance, but as that least liable to suspicion, a passage from the opening of the poem.

'Such the sun, the moon,

Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils,
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead,' &c.

Here it is clear that the word, and not the idea, moon,
produces the simple sheep and their shady boon, and that
'the dooms of the mighty dead' would never have in-
truded themselves but for the 'fair musk-rose blooms.'
"Again-

'For 'twas the morn. Apollo's upward fire
Made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre
Of brightness so unsullied that therein
A melancholy spirit well might win
Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine
Into the winds. Rain-scented eglantine
Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;
The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run
To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;
Man's voice was on the mountains: and the mass
Of Nature's lives and wonders pulsed tenfold
To feel this sunrise and its glories old.'

Here Apollo's fire produces a pyre—a silvery pyre-of clouds, wherein a spirit might win oblivion, and melt his essence fine; and scented eglantine gives sweets to the sun, and cold springs had run into the grass; and then the pulse of the mass pulsed tenfold to feel the glories old of the new-born day, &c.

"One example more—

'Be still the unimaginable lodge

For solitary thinkings, such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,

Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven
That, spreading in this dull and clodded earth,
Gives it a touch ethereal-a new birth.'

Lodge, dodge-heaven, leaven-earth, birth-such, in six words, is the sum and substance of six lines.

"We come now to the author's taste in versification. He cannot indeed write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able to spin a line. Let us see. The following are specimens of his prosodial notions of our English heroic

metre:

'Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite.

'So plenteously all weed-hidden roots.

'Of some strange history, potent to send.

'Before the deep intoxication.

'Her scarf into a fluttering pavilion.

'The stubborn canvas for my voyage prepared.

'Endymion, the cave is secreter

Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir

No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise

Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys
And trembles through my labyrinthine hair.'

"By this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines. We now present them with some of the new

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."

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