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.
The readers of the Examiner newspaper were informed, some time ago, by a
solemn paragraph, in Mr. Hunt's best style, of the appearance of two new
stars of glorious magnitude and splendour
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