Shall we add,

  et respondere parati?

Z. ON KEATS

[From Blackwood’s Magazine, August, 1818]

COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY

No.  IV

 ——­ OF KEATS,
  THE MUSES’ SON OF PROMISE, AND WHAT FEATS
  HE YET MAY DO, &C.

CORNELIUS WEBB.

Of all the manias of this mad age, the most incurable, as well as the most common, seems to be no other than the Metromanie.  The just celebrity of Robert Burns and Miss Baillie has had the melancholy effect of turning the heads of we know not how many farm-servants and unmarried ladies; our very footmen compose tragedies, and there is scarcely a superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of lyrics behind her in her band-box.  To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting.  It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr. John Keats.  This young man appears to have received from nature talents of an excellent, perhaps even of a superior order—­ talents which, devoted to the purposes of any useful profession, must have rendered him a respectable, if not an eminent citizen.  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.  But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady to which we have alluded.  Whether Mr. John had been sent home with a diuretic or composing draught to some patient far gone in the poetical mania, we have not heard.  This much is certain, that he has caught the infection, and that thoroughly.  For some time we were in hopes, that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible.  The phrenzy of the “Poems” 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.  Time, firm treatment, and rational restraint, do much for many apparently hopeless invalids; and if Mr. Keats should happen, at some interval of reason, to cast his eye upon our pages, he may perhaps be convinced of the existence of his malady, which, in such cases, is often all that is necessary to put the patient in a fair way of being cured.