it deserved as much censure as the pages of your Review record against it.  But, not to mention that there is a certain contemptuousness of phraseology, from which it Is difficult for a critic to abstain, in the review of Endymion, I do not think that the writer has given it its due praise.  Surely the poem, with all its faults, is a very remarkable production for a man of Keats’s age[7]; and the promise of ultimate excellence is such as has rarely been afforded even by such as have afterwards attained high literary eminence.  Look at book 2, line 833, &c., and book 3, lines 113 to 120; read down that page, and then again from line 193[8].  I could cite many other passages to convince you that it deserved milder usage.  Why it should have been reviewed at all, excepting for the purpose of bringing its excellences into notice, I cannot conceive; for it was very little read, and there was no danger that it should become a model to the age of that false taste with which I confess that it is replenished.

’Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review, which, I am persuaded, was not written with any intention of producing the effect—­to which it has at least greatly contributed—­of embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are now but faint hopes of his recovery.  The first effects are described to me to have resembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide.  The agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and the usual process of consumption appears to have begun.  He is coming to pay me a visit in Italy; but I fear that, unless his mind can be kept tranquil, little is to be hoped from the mere influence of climate.

’But let me not extort anything from your pity.  I have just seen a second volume, published by him evidently in careless despair.  I have desired my bookseller to send you a copy:  and allow me to solicit your especial attention to the fragment of a poem entitled Hyperion, the composition of which was checked by the review in question.  The great proportion of this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry.  I speak impartially, for the canons of taste to which Keats has conformed in his other compositions are the very reverse of my own.  I leave you to judge for yourself:  it would be an insult to you to suppose that, from motives however honourable, you would lend yourself to a deception of the public.’

The question arises, How did Shelley know what he here states—­that Keats was thrown, by reading the Quarterly article, into a state resembling insanity, that he contemplated suicide, &c.?  Not any document has been published whereby this information could have been imparted to Shelley:  his chief informant on the subject appears to have been Mr. Gisborne, who had now for a short while returned to England, and some confirmation may have come from Hunt.  As to the statements themselves, they have, ever since the appearance in 1848 of Lord Houghton’s Life of Keats, been regarded as very gross exaggerations:  indeed, I think the tendency has since then been excessive in the reverse direction, and the vexation occasioned to Keats by hostile criticism has come to be underrated.