Today John Wilson Croker is remembered as the man who "murdered" John Keats--at least if we are to trust Percy Bysshe Shelley, who claimed that Croker's savage review of Keats's Endymion (Quarterly Review, May 1818) "produced the most violent effect on [Keats's] susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs ..." (preface to Adonais, 1821). While Keats's letters reveal that he took the criticism of the Quarterly Review with greater equanimity than is suggested by Shelley's account, the myth surrounding Croker's assault remains. In fact, Croker earned the enmity of many liberal and revolutionary figures of his day, from William Hazlitt, who called him a "talking potatoe" (The Plain Speaker, 1826) to Thomas Babington Macaulay. William Make-peace Thackeray caricatured him as Mr. Wenham in Vanity Fair (1847-1848). Sydney, Lady Morgan, used him as the model for Conway Crawley in her novel Florence Macarthy (1818). He...