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. 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.... 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 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. 'Knowing within myself,' he says, 'the
manner [&c., down to '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'