time venture fifty pounds upon anything he can write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to "plasters, pills, and ointment boxes," etc. But for heaven's sake, young Sangrado,1 be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry. THE QUARTERLY REVIEW KEATS'S "ENDYMION" 1818 [Written by John Wilson Croker; published in the April number. This is the famous review to which, by a baseless tradition, Keats's death was attributed, and which therefore gave rise to Shelley's Adonais. Keats's own attitude was expressed in a letter in which he said: "My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict."] REVIEWERS have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticize. On the present occasion we shall anticipate the author's complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his work. Not that we have been wanting in our duty far from it; indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it; but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books of which this Poetic Romance consists. We should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation, namely, that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we have so painfully toiled, than we are with that of the three which we have not looked into. It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody), — it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius; 1 A quack in Le Sage's Gil Blas. he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney poetry, which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language. Of this school Mr. Leigh Hunt, as we observed in a former number, aspires to be the hierophant. Our readers will recollect the pleasant recipes for harmonious and sublime poetry which he gave us in his preface to Rimini, and the still more facetious instances of his harmony and sublimity in the verses themselves; and they will recollect above all the contempt of Pope, Johnson, and such like poetasters and pseudo-critics, which so forcibly contrasted itself with Mr. Leigh Hunt's self-complacent approbation of all the things itself had wrote, Of special merit though of little note. This author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt; but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. But Mr. Keats has advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples; his nonsense therefore is quite gratuitous; he writes it for its own sake, and, being bitten by Mr. Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry. Mr. Keats's preface hints that his poem was produced under peculiar circumstances. "Knowing within myself," he says, "the manner in which this poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public. What manner I mean will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished." We humbly beg his pardon, but this does not appear to us to be quite so clear we really do not know what he means; but the next passage is more intelligible. "The two first books, and indeed the two last, I feel sensible are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press." Thus "the two first books" are, even in his own judgment, unfit to appear, and “the two last" are, it it seems, in the same condition; and as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we have a clear and, we believe, a very just estimate of the entire work. Mr. Keats, however, deprecates criticism on this “immature and feverish work" in terms which are themselves sufficiently feverish; and we confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him any of the tortures of the "fierce hell" of criticism, which terrify his imagination, if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might write more, if we had not observed in him 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; 1 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 the 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 1 End-rimes. For simple sheep; and such are daffodils We have imagined for the mighty dead; etc., etc. 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 intruded themselves but for the "fair musk-rose blooms." Again: For 't was the morn: Apollo's upward fire 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 ten-fold to feel the glories old of the new-born day, etc. . . . 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 "gordian'd 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 upfollowed," and "night up-took"; "the wind up-blows," 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. TENNYSON'S POEMS 1833 [Written by John Wilson Croker; published in the April number. It has been disputed how far Tennyson's failure to publish other volumes during the succeeding decade was due to this review; the matter is fully discussed in Lounsbury's Life and Times of Tennyson.] THIS is, as some of his marginal notes intimate, Mr. Tennyson's second appearance. By some strange chance we have never seen his first publication, which, if it at all resembles its younger brother, must be by this time so popular that any notice of it on our part would seem idle and presumptuous; but we gladly seize this opportunity of repairing an unintentional neglect, and of introducing to the admiration of our more sequestered readers a new prodigy of genius- another and a brighter star of that galaxy or Milky Way of poetry of which the lamented Keats was the harbinger. And let us take this occasion to sing our palinode on the subject of Endymion. We certainly did not discover in that poem the same degree of merit that its more clear-sighted and prophetic admirers did. We |