SOURCE: Jones, Leonidas M. “Reynolds and Rice in Defence of Patmore.” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 21 (1970): 12-20.

In the following essay, Jones relates the details of a legal case that illuminates both Reynolds's career as an attorney and the intense rivalries among the periodicals for which Reynolds often wrote.

Charles Brown wrote to Keats on 21 December 1820: ‘I know you don't like John Scott, but he is doing a thing that tickles me to the heart's core, and you will like to hear of it, if you have any revenge in your composition. By some means (crooked enough I dare say) he has got possession of one of Blackwood's gang, who has turned King's evidence, and month after month he belabours them with the most damning facts that can be conceived;—if they are indeed facts, I know not how the rogues can stand up against them’.¹

Brown's guesses were shrewd...