Even the death of Keats, in 1821, did not abate the rancour of Blackwood’s Magazine.  Witness the following extracts. (1823) ’Keats had been dished—­utterly demolished and dished—­by Blackwood long before Mr. Gifford’s scribes mentioned his name....  But let us hear no more of Johnny Keats.  It is really too disgusting to have him and his poems recalled in this manner after all the world thought they had got rid of the concern.’ (1824) ’Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats’s poetry “grasped with one hand in his bosom”—­rather an awkward posture, as you will be convinced if you try it.  But what a rash man Shelley was to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack’s poetry on board!...  Down went the boat with a “swirl”!  I lay a wager that it righted soon after ejecting Jack.’... (1826) ’Keats was a Cockney, and Cockneys claimed him for their own.  Never was there a young man so encrusted with conceit.’

If this is the tone adopted by Blackwood’s Magazine in relation to Keats living and dead, one need not be surprised to find that the verdict of the same review upon the poem of Adonais, then newly published, ran to the following effect:—­

’Locke says the most resolute liar cannot lie more than once in every three sentences.  Folly is more engrossing; for we could prove from the present Elegy that it is possible to write two sentences of pure nonsense out of three.  A more faithful calculation would bring us to ninety-nine out of every hundred; or—­as the present consists of only fifty-five stanzas—­leaving about five readable lines in the entire....  A Mr. Keats, who had left a decent calling for the melancholy trade of Cockney poetry, has lately died of a consumption, after having written two or three little books of verses much neglected by the public....  The New School, however, will have it that he was slaughtered by a criticism of the Quarterly Review:  “O flesh, how art thou fishified!” There is even an aggravation in this cruelty of the Review—­for it had taken three or four years to slay its victim, the deadly blow having been inflicted at least as long since. [This is not correct:  the Quarterly critique, having appeared in September, 1818, preceded the death of Keats by two years and five months]....  The fact is, the Quarterly, finding before it a work at once silly and presumptuous, full of the servile slang that Cockaigne dictates to its servitors, and the vulgar indecorums which that Grub Street Empire rejoiceth to applaud, told the truth of the volume, and recommended a change of manners[14] and of masters to the scribbler.  Keats wrote on; but he wrote indecently, probably in the indulgence of his social propensities.’

The virulence with which Shelley, as author of Adonais, was assailed by Blackwood’s Magazine, is the more remarkable, and the more symptomatic of partizanship against Keats and any of his upholders, as this review had in previous instances been exceptionally civil to Shelley, though of course with some serious offsets.  The notices of Alastor, Rosalind and Helen, and Prometheus Unbound—­more especially the first—­in the years 1819 and 1820, would be found to bear out this statement.