lear-eyed nations in empurpled vests,
And crowns and turbans. With unladen breasts,
Save of blown self-applause, they proudly mount
To their spirit's perch, their being's high account,
Their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones,
Amid the fierce intoxicating tones
Of trumpets, shoutings, and belaboured drums,
And sudden cannon."

A rather more sensible embodiment of his political feelings is a stanza
which he wrote, perhaps in 1818, at the close of canto 5, book ii. of
"The Faery Queen." In this stanza the revolutionary Giant, who had been
suppressed by Artegall and Talus, is represented as being pieced
together again by Typographus, the Printing-press, and so trained up as
to become more than a match for his former victors. There is also, in a
letter to George Keats dated in September 1819, a rather long and
detailed passage on politics covering a wide period in English and
European history, on the oscillations of governmental and popular power
&c., and on the writer's sympathy with the enlightenment and progress of
the people. It closes with an admiring description of Sandt, the
assassin of Kotzebue, as pourtrayed in a profile likeness. As to Hunt,
some expressions in a letter from George Keats to Dilke are decidedly
strong:--"I should be extremely sorry that poor John's name should go
down to posterity associated with the littlenesses of Leigh Hunt--an
association of which he was so impatient in his lifetime. He speaks of
him patronizingly; that he would have defended him against the reviewers
if he had known his nervous irritation at their abuse of him, and says
that on that point only he was reserved to him. The fact was, he more
dreaded Hunt's defence than their abuse. You know all this as well as I
do."

Apart from his own special capability for poetry, Keats had a mind both
active and capacious. The depth, pregnancy, and incisiveness, of many of
the remarks in his letters, glancing along a considerable range of
subject-matter, are highly noticeable. If some one were to take the
pains of extracting and classifying them, he would do a good service to
readers. It does not appear, however, that Keats took much interest in
any kind of knowledge which could not be made applicable or subservient
to the purposes of poetry. Many will remember the anecdote, proper to
Haydon's "immortal dinner" (December 1817), of Keats's joining with
Charles Lamb in denouncing Sir Isaac Newton for