Quarterly_ as
unmetrical, are, when read with the right emphasis, blameless, or even
sonorous. But the article is none the less a despicable and odious
performance; partly as being a sneering depreciation of a work showing
rich poetic endowment, and partly as being, not a deliberate and candid
(however severe) estimate of Keats as a poet, but really an utterance of
malice prepense, and hardly disguised, against Hunt as a hostile
politician who wrote poetry, and against any one who consorted with him.
The inverting of the due balance between the merits and the defects of
"Endymion," would have been at best an act of stupidity; at second best,
after the author's preface had been laid to heart, an act of brutalism;
and at worst, when the venom of abuse was poured into the poetic cup of
Keats as an expedient for drugging the political cup of Hunt, an act of
partisan turpitude. No more words need be wasted upon a proceeding of
which the abiding and unevadeable literary record is graven in the brass
of Shelley's "Adonais."

The attack in _The Quarterly Review_ was accompanied by attacks in
_Blackwood's Magazine_. If _The Quarterly_ was carping and ill-natured,
_Blackwood_ was basely insulting. A series of articles "On the Cockney
School of Poetry" began in the Scotch magazine in October 1817, being
directed mainly, and with calumnious virulence, against Leigh Hunt. No.
4 of the series came out in August 1818, and formed a vituperation of
Keats. I will not draw upon its stores of underbred jocularity, so as to
show that the best raillery which _Blackwood_ could get up consisted of
terming him Johnny Keats, and referring to his having been assistant to
an "apothecary." The author of these papers signed himself Z, being no
doubt too noble and courageous to traduce people without muffling
himself in anonymity; nor did he consent to uncloak, though vigorously
pressed by Hunt to do so. It is affirmed that Z was Lockhart, the
son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, and afterwards editor of _The Quarterly
Review_; and an unpleasant adjunct to this statement--we would gladly
disbelieve it--is that Scott himself lent active aid in concocting the
articles. A different account is that Z was at first John Wilson
(Christopher North), revised by William Blackwood, but that the article
on Keats was due to Lockhart.

Few literary questions of the last three-quarters of a century have been
regarded from more absolutely different points of view than