Prometheus
Unbound" is a "great storehouse of the obscure and unintelligible." In the
"Sensitive Plant" there is "no meaning." And for Shelley himself, he is
guilty of a great many terrible things, including verbiage, impiety,
immorality and absurdity.

Of Blackwood's Magazine the special victims were Keats and Hunt and
Coleridge. "Mr. Coleridge," says the reviewer, "... seems to believe that
every tongue is wagging in his praise--that every ear is open to imbibe the
oracular breathings of his inspiration ... no sound is so sweet to him as
that of his own voice ... he seems to consider the mighty universe itself
as nothing better than a mirror in which, with a grinning and idiot
self-complacency, he may contemplate the physiognomy of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge.... Yet insignificant as he assuredly is, he cannot put pen to
paper without a feeling that millions of eyes are fixed upon him...."

Leigh Hunt, says Blackwood, "is a man of extravagant pretensions ...
exquisitely bad taste and extremely vulgar modes of thinking." His
"Rimini" "is so wretchedly written that one feels disgust at its pretense,
affectation and gaudiness, ignorance, vulgarity, irreverence, quackery,
glittering and rancid obscenities."

Blackwood's wrote of the "calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy
of Endymion," and elsewhere of Keats' "prurient and vulgar lines, evidently
meant for some young lady east of Temple Bar.... It is a better and a wiser
thing," it commented, "to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so
back to the shop, Mr. John, back to 'plasters, pills and ointment
boxes.'" And even when Shelley wrote his "Adonais" on the death of Keats,
Blackwood's met it with a contemptible parody:

"Weep for my Tom cat! all ye Tabbies weep!"

Perhaps I have quoted enough. This is the parentage of our silken and
flattering criticism.

The pages of these old reviews rest yellow on the shelves. From them there
comes a smell of rotting leather, as though the infection spreads. The hour
grows late. Like the ghost of the elder Hamlet, I detect the morning to be
near.

The Pursuit of Fire

Reader, if by chance you have the habit of writing--whether they be sermons
to hurl across your pews, or sonnets in the Spring--doubtless you have
moments when you sit at your desk bare of thoughts. Mother Hubbard's
cupboard when she went to seek the bone was not more empty. In such plight
you chew your pencil as though it were stuff to feed