Blackwood’s wrote of the “calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of Endymion,” and elsewhere of Keats’ “prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some young lady east of Temple Bar....  It is a better and a wiser thing,” it commented, “to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to ’plasters, pills and ointment boxes.’” And even when Shelley wrote his “Adonais” on the death of Keats, Blackwood’s met it with a contemptible parody: 

“Weep for my Tom cat! all ye Tabbies weep!”

Perhaps I have quoted enough.  This is the parentage of our silken and flattering criticism.

The pages of these old reviews rest yellow on the shelves.  From them there comes a smell of rotting leather, as though the infection spreads.  The hour grows late.  Like the ghost of the elder Hamlet, I detect the morning to be near.

The Pursuit of Fire

Reader, if by chance you have the habit of writing—­whether they be sermons to hurl across your pews, or sonnets in the Spring—­doubtless you have moments when you sit at your desk bare of thoughts.  Mother Hubbard’s cupboard when she went to seek the bone was not more empty.  In such plight you chew your pencil as though it were stuff to feed your brain.  Or if you are of delicate taste, you fall upon your fingers.  Or in the hope that exercise will stir your wits, you pace up and down the room and press your nose upon the window if perhaps the grocer’s boy shall rouse you.  Some persons draw pictures on their pads or put pot-hooks on their letters—­for talent varies—­or they roughen up their hair.  I knew one gifted fellow whose shoes presently would cramp him until he kicked them off, when at once the juices of his intellect would flow.  Genius, I am told, sometimes locks its door and, if unrestrained, peels its outer wrappings.  Or, in your poverty, you run through the pages of a favorite volume, with a notebook for a sly theft to start you off.  In what dejection you have fallen!  It is best that you put on your hat and take your stupid self abroad.

Or maybe you think that your creative fire will blaze, if instead of throwing in your wet raw thoughts, you feed it a few seasoned bits.  You open, therefore, the drawer of your desk where you keep your rejected and broken fragments—­for your past has not been prosperous—­hopeful against experience that you can recast one of these to your present mood.  This is mournful business.  Certain paragraphs that came from you hot are now patched and shivery.  Their finer meaning has run out between the lines as though these spaces were sluices for the proper drainage of the page.  You had best put on your hat.  You will get no comfort from these stale papers.