not been able to struggle beyond
the first of the four books[1] 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 that book through which we have so
painfully toiled than we are with that of the three which we have not
looked into.

[1] _Endymion: A Poetic Romance_. By John Keats. London, 1818.

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--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 approbation of

--All the things itself had wrote,
Of special merit though of little note.

The 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 had 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....

The two first books, and indeed the two last, are not of such
completion as to warrant their passing the press. p. vii.

Thus, "the two first books" are, even in his own judgment, unfit to
appear, and "the two last" are, it seems, in the same condition--and as
two and two make fo