’It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody)—­it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius.  He has all these:  but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called “Cockney Poetry,” which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language.

’Of this school Mr. Leigh Hunt, as we observed in a former number, aspires to be the hierophant....  This author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd, than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning.  But Mr. Keats had advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples.  His nonsense, therefore, is quite gratuitous; he writes it for its own sake, and, being bitten by Mr. Leigh Hunt’s insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry.

’Mr. Keats’s preface hints that his poem was produced under peculiar circumstances.  “Knowing within myself.” he says, “the manner in which this poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public.  What manner I mean will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished.”  We humbly beg his pardon, but this does not appear to us to be “quite so clear”; we really do not know what he means.  But the next passage is more intelligible.  “The two first books, and indeed the two last, I feel sensible, are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press.”  Thus “the two first books” are, even in his own judgment, unfit to appear, and “the two last” are, it seems, in the same condition; and, as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we have a clear, and we believe a very just, estimate of the entire work.

’Mr. Keats, however, deprecates criticism on this “immature and feverish work” in terms which are themselves sufficiently feverish; and we confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him any of the tortures of the “fierce hell” of criticism[15] which terrify his imagination if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might write more; if we had not observed in him a certain degree of talent which deserves to be put in the right way, or which at least ought to be warned of the wrong; and if finally he had not told us that he is of an age and temper which imperiously require mental discipline.