stifies what Keats said (in his
letter of October 9, 1818, quoted in our Chapter v.) of the experience
which he was sure to gain by the adventurous plunge he had made in
"Endymion." Of course it was a less arduous attempt; the subject being
one of directly human passion, the story ready-furnished to him by
Boccaccio, and the narrative much briefer. Except in altering the
locality from Messina to Florence (a change which seems objectless),
Keats has adhered faithfully enough to the sweet and sad story of
Boccaccio; he has however amplified it much in detail, for the Italian
tale is a short one. "Isabella" has always been a favourite with the
readers of Keats, and deservedly so; it is tender, touching, and
picturesque. Yet I should not place it in the very first rank of the
poet's works--the treatment seems to me at once more ambitious and less
masculine than is needed. The writer seems too conscious that he has set
himself to narrating something pathetic; he tells the story _ab extra_,
and enlarges on "the pity of it," instead of leaving the pity to speak
to the heart out of the very circumstances themselves. The brothers may
have been "ledger-men" and "money-bags" (Boccaccio does not insist upon
any such phase of character), and they certainly became criminals,
though the Italian author treats their murder of Lorenzo as if it were a
sufficiently obvious act in vindication of the family honour; but, when
Keats "again asks aloud" why these commercial brothers were proud, he
seems to intrude upon us overmuch the personality of the narrator of a
tragic story, and pounds away at his text like a pulpiteer. This is only
one instance of the flaw which runs through the poem--that it is all
told as with a direct appeal to the reader to be sympathetic--indignant
now, and now compassionate. Leigh Hunt has pointed out the absurdity of
putting into the mouth of one of the brother "money-bags," just as they
are about to execute their plot for murdering Lorenzo, the lines (though
he praises the pretty conceit in itself)--

"Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
His dewy rosary on the eglantine."

The author's invocation to Melancholy, Music, Echo, Spirits in grief,
and Melpomene, to condole the approaching death of Isabella, seems to me
a _fadeur_ hardly more appropriate than the money-bag's epigram upon the
"dewy rosary." But the reader is probably tired of my qualifying clauses
for the admiration with which he regar