for any great public good, but I hate a mawkish popularity."

In a fine fragment too, written about this time, he spoke of

"Bards who died content on pleasant sward,
Leaving great verse unto a little clan.

O give me their old vigour, and unheard,
Save of the quiet Primrose, and the span
Of Heaven and few cars,

Rounded by thee, my song should die away
Content as theirs,

Rich in the simple worship of a day."

And yet, after all, the Preface which did appear was in the main deprecatory and with no "undersong of disrespect for the public;" and when the Poet looked back on his labour he found it "a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished." He said; "the imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy, but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted."

Surely, there was much in this to disarm the violence of the criticism which was levelled at the Poem at its first birth into literary existence. The articles themselves, both in the "Quarterly" and in

Blackwood," were so superficial and coarse, ko thoroughly uncritical, that, whatever sensations of disgust and anger they may have aroused at the time, there could hardly have been a question of their permanent influence on the mind and destiny of Keats, but for the belief of many of his friends that

they inflicted on his susceptible nature a shock which he never recovered. This notion was confirmed in public estimation by the well-known stanza of the eleventh canto of Don Juan; concluding

""Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article."

It is perhaps bold to say in opposition to the testimony of many near and dear friends of Keats, that these effects had no existence, but it is certain they have been greatly exaggerated. The sublime curse hurled at the brutal critic in the "Adonais" of Shelley has its due place in that lofty elegy, but with such means as we have to judge from, with the letters and acts of Keats immediately after the reviews appeared, before us, his feelings seem to have had much more of indignation and contempt in them than of wounded pride and mortified vanity. I should incline to believe that the little public interest which "Endymion" excited, and the growing sense of his own deficiencies, weighed far more on his mind than those shallow ribaldries, which Jeffrey's article in the Edinburgh Review, if it had appeared somewhat sooner, would have so completely counterbalanced. When told "to go back to his gallipots," just as Simon Peter might have been told to go back to his nets, and when reminded that "a starved apothecary was better than a starved poet," his inclination certainly was rather to call the satirist to account, "if he appears in squares and theatres where we might possibly meet," than to let the scoffing visibly affect his health and spirits. Indeed in a

MEMOIR OF JOHN KEATS.

xxxi

letter to his publisher, after thanking some writer who had vindicated him, he says:

*

I

"As for the rest, I begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness. Praise 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; and also when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. will write independently. I have written independently without judgment, I may write independently, and with judgment, hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself. In 'Endymion' I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and taken tea and comfortable advice." He also wrote to his brother:-"This is a mere matter of the moment. I think I shall be among the English poets after my death. Even as a matter of present interest, the attempt to crush me in the Quarterly has only brought me more into notice. * It does me not the least harm in society to make me appear little and ridiculous. I know when a man is superior to me, and give him all due respect; he will be the last to laugh at me." And again on his birth

*

day:-"The only thing that can ever affect me personally for more than one short passing day, is any doubt about my powers for poetry: I seldom have any; and I look with hope to the nighing time when I shall have none."

After reading these passages it is difficult to see in what spirit more wise or manly an author could receive unseemly and insolent criticism. When Lord Byron boasts that, after the article on his early poems, "instead of breaking a blood-vessel," he drank three bottles of claret and began an answer, "finding that there was nothing in it for which he could, lawfully, knock Jeffrey on the head, in an honourable way," one is glad of the indignation that produced the "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," but the use which Keats made of the annoyance in elevating and purifying his self-judgment is surely far more estimable. The letters show that no morbid feelings prevented him from most heartily enjoying his Scotch tour, where the sublimities of nature met him for the first time. He went to the country of Burns as on a pilgrimage, and notwithstanding that he was shown the cottage of Kirk Alloway "by a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew Burns, and who ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him," he says, 66 one of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine: we need not think of his misery—— that is all gone, bad luck to it! I shall look upon it hereafter with unmixed pleasure, as I do on my Stratford-on-Avon day with Bailey."

It gave some colour to the belief of the mental injury inflicted on Keats by the reviewers, that after

this time his spirits and health began to decline, and the short remainder of his life was exposed to continual troubles and anxieties. His brother Tom, whom he loved most devotedly, and who much resembled himself in temperament and appearance, died in the autumn, and shortly before this event he met the lady who inspired him with the profound passion which under other circumstances might have combined all his dreams of happiness, but which was destined to increase tenfold the bitterness of his premature decay.* Up to this period he had been singularly shy of women's society, and frequently expressed himself freely on the subject, as for instance :

"I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women; at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy, I thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I thought them ethereal, above men. I find them perhaps equalgreat by comparison is very small. among men, I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent. I can listen, and from every one I can learn. When I am among women, I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone. You must be charitable, and put all this

* *

When

* In Keats's copy of Shakspeare, the words Poor Tom, in King Lear," are pathetically underlined.

C