ine, and he
was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But
all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady to which we have
alluded. Whether Mr John had been sent home with a diuretic or composing
draught to some patient far gone in the poetical mania, we have not
heard. This much is certain, that he has caught the infection, and that
thoroughly. For some time we were in hopes, that he might get off with a
violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The phrenzy
of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half
so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of
"Endymion." We hope, however, that in so young a person, and with a
constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly
incurable. Time, firm treatment, and rational restraint, do much for
many apparently hopeless invalids; and if Mr Keats should happen, at
some interval of reason, to cast his eye upon our pages, he may perhaps
be convinced of the existence of his malady, which, in such cases, is
often all that is necessary to put the patient in a fair way of being
cured.

The readers of the Examiner newspaper were informed, some time ago, by a
solemn paragraph, in Mr Hunt's best style, of the appearance of two new
stars of glorious magnitude and splendour in the poetical horizon of the
land of Cockaigne. One of these turned out, by and by, to be no other
than Mr John Keats. This precocious adulation confirmed the wavering
apprentice in his desire to quit the gallipots, and at the same time
excited in his too susceptible mind a fatal admiration for the character
and talents of the most worthless and affected of all the versifiers of
our time. One of his first productions was the following sonnet,
"_written on the day when Mr Leigh Hunt left prison_." It will be
recollected, that the cause of Hunt's confinement was a series of libels
against his sovereign, and that its fruit was the odious and incestuous
"Story of Rimini."

"What though, for shewing truth to flattered state,
_Kind Hunt_ was shut in prison, yet has he,
In his immortal spirit been as free
As the sky-searching lark and as elate.
Minion of grandeur! think you he did wait?
Think you he nought but prison walls did see,
Till, so unwilling, thou unturn'dst the key?
Ah, no! far happier, nobler was his fate!
_In Spenser's halls!_ he strayed, and bowers fair,
Cull