ely mild in its censure.

One would naturally suppose that the death of Keats would have ensured
at least a respectful consideration for Shelley's lament, _Adonais_
(1821); but the callous critics were by no means abashed. The outrageous
article in the _Literary Gazette_ of December 8, 1821, pp. (772-773), is
one of the unpardonable errors of literary criticism; but it sinks into
insignificance beside the brutal, unquotable review which _Blackwood's
Magazine_ permitted to appear in its pages. In the same year Shelley's
youthful poetical indiscretion, _Queen Mab_, which he himself called
"villainous trash," was published under circumstances beyond his
control, and forthwith the readers of the _Literary Gazette_ were
regaled with ten columns of foul abuse from the pen of a critic who
declared that he was driven almost speechless by the sentiments
expressed in the poem. Well could the heartless reviewer of _Adonais_
write:--"If criticism killed the disciples of that [the Cockney]
school, Shelley would not have been alive to write an elegy on another."

115. _Eye in a fine phrenzy rolling_. Shakespeare's _Midsummer-Night's
Dream_, V, 1, 12.

115. _Above this visible diurnal sphere_. Milton's _Paradise Lost_, Book
VII, 22.

116. _Parca quod satis est manu_. Horace, _Odes_, III, 16, 24.

116. _Lord Fanny_. A nickname bestowed upon Lord Hervey, an effeminate
noble of the time of George II.

117. _O! rus, quando ego te aspiciam_. Horace, _Satires_, II, 6, 60.

117. _Mordecai_. See Book of _Esther_, V, 13.

118. _Last of the Romans_. Mark Antony in Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_,
III, 2, 194.

120. _Full fathom five_. Shakespeare's _The Tempest_, I, 2, 396.

126. _Ohe! jam satis est_. Horace, _Satires_, I, 5, 12-13.

126. _Tristram Shandy_. The excommunication is in vol. III, chap. XI.

133. _Put a girdle_, etc. See Shakespeare's _Midsummer-Night's Dream_,
II, 1, 175.

JOHN KEATS

The history of English poetry offers no more interesting case between
poet and critic than that of John Keats. The imputed influence of a
savage critique in hastening the death of the poet has given the
_Quarterly Review_ an unenviable notoriety which clings in spite of the
efforts of scholars to establish the truth. To many students, Keats,
_Endymion_, and _Quarterly_ are practically connotative terms; and this
is a direct result of the righteous but misguided indignation of
Shelley--misguided because his information was incomplete a