It may have been observed that Shelley, whenever he speaks of critical depreciation of Keats, refers only to one periodical, the Quarterly Review:  probably he did not distinctly know of any other:  but the fact is that Blackwood’s Magazine was worse than the Quarterly.  The latter was sneering and supercilious:  Blackwood was vulgarly taunting and insulting, and seems to have provoked Keats the more of the two, though perhaps he considered the attack in the Quarterly to be more detrimental to his literary standing.  The Quarterly notice is of so much import in the life and death of Keats, and in the genesis of Adonais, that I shall give it, practically in extenso, before closing this section of my work:  with Blackwood I can deal at once.  A series of articles On the Cockney School of Poetry began in this magazine in October, 1817, being directed mainly and very venomously against Leigh Hunt.  No. 4 of the series appeared in August, 1818, falling foul of Keats.  It is difficult to say whether the priority in abusing Keats should of right be assigned to Blackwood or to the Quarterly:  the critique in the latter review belongs to the number for April, 1818, but this number was not actually issued until September.  The writer of the Blackwood papers signed himself Z. Z. is affirmed to have been Lockhart, the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, and afterwards editor of the Quarterly Review:  more especially the article upon Keats is attributed to Lockhart.  A different account, as to the series in general, is that the author was John Wilson (Christopher North), revised by Mr. William Blackwood.  But Z. resisted more than one vigorous challenge to unmask, and some doubt as to his identity may still remain.  Here are some specimens of the amenity with which Keats was treated in Blackwood’s Magazine:—­

’His friends, we understand, destined him to the career of medicine, and he was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town....  The frenzy of the Poems [Keats’s first volume, 1817] was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of Endymion....  We hope however that, in so young a person and with a constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable....  Mr. Hunt is a small poet, but a clever man; Mr. Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of pretty abilities which he has done everything in his power to spoil....  It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet:  so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to “plaster, pills, and ointment-boxes,” &c.  But for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.’