his part, or at least notified his concurrence. The
following well-known diatribe is also important, and should be kept in
mind when we come to speak of the reception accorded to Keats by
established critics, more or less of the old school. He has been
dilating on the splendours of British poetry of the great era, say
Spenser to Milton, and then proceeds--

"Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism
Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories: with a puling infant's force
They swayed about upon a rocking-horse,
And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal-souled!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled
Its gathering waves--ye felt it not; the blue
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer-night collected still to make
The morning precious. Beauty was awake--
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of--were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile; so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smoothe, inlay, and chip, and fit,
Till--like the certain wands of Jacob's wit--
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task;
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated impious race,
That blasphemed the bright lyrist to his face,
And did not know it! No, they went about
Holding a poor decrepit standard out
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau."

Zeal is generally pardonable. Keats's was manifestly honest zeal, and
flaming forth in the right direction. Yet it would have been well for
him to remember and indicate that amid his "school of dolts," bearing
the flag of Boileau, there had been some very strong and capable men,
notably Dryden and Pope, who could do several things besides inlaying
and clipping; nor could it be said that the beauty of the world had been
wholly blinked by so pre-eminently descriptive a poet as Thomson; and,
if we were to read Boileau--which few of us do now-a-days, and I daresay
Keats was not one of the few--we should probably find that his "mottoes"
were much less concerned with inlaying and clipping than with solid
meaning and studious congruity--qualities not totally contemptible, but
(be it acknowledged) very largely contemned by Keats in that first
slender performance of his adolescence named "Poems, 1817."

It