Dear as the temple’s self, so does the moon,
  The passion poesy, glories infinite, p. 4.

  So plenteously all weed-hidden roots, p. 6.

...  By this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the meaning of his sentences and the structures of his lines:  we now present them with some of the new words with which, in imitation of Mr. Leigh Hunt, he adorns our language.

We are told that “turtles passion their voices” (p. 15); that “an arbour was nested” (p. 23); and a lady’s locks “gordian’d” up (p. 32); and to supply the place of nouns thus verbalised Mr. Keats, with great fecundity, spawns new ones; such as “men-slugs and human serpentry” (p. 14); “honey-feel of bliss” (p. 45); “wives prepare needments” (p. 13)—­and so forth.

Then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads; thus “the wine out-sparkled” (p. 10); the “multitude up-follow’d” (p. 11); and “night up-took” (p. 29).  “The wind up-blows” (p. 32); and the “hours are down-sunken” (p. 36).

But if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs he compensates the language with adverbs and adjectives which he separates from the parent stock.  Thus, a lady “whispers pantingly and close,” makes “hushing signs,” and steers her skiff into a “ripply cove” (p. 23); a shower falls “refreshfully” (p. 45); and a vulture has a “spreaded tail” (p. 44).

But enough of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophite.—­If anyone should be bold enough to purchase this “Poetic Romance,” and so much more patient than ourselves, as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success; we shall then return to the task which we now abandon in despair, and endeavour to make all due amends to Mr. Keats and to our readers.

CROKER ON SYDNEY SMITH

[From The Quarterly Review, February, 1810]

This sermon[1] is written on the characters and duties of the clergy.  Perhaps it would have produced more effect upon the Yorkshire divines had it come from one who had lived longer among them, and of the correspondence of whose life with his doctrines, they had better opportunities of judging; one whom, from long experience, they knew to be neither sullied by the little “affectations,” nor “agitated by the little vanities of the world,” whose strict observance of “those decencies and proprieties,” which persons in their profession “owe to their situation in society,” they had remarked through a long course of years.  Whether the life of Mr. Smith would form an illustration of his own precepts remains to be proved.  But, if we rightly recollect dates, he is still to his neighbours a sort of unknown person, and hardly yet tried in his new situation of a parish priest.  We therefore think, in spite of all the apologies with which he has prefaced his advice, that a more judicious topic might easily have been selected.