sublime as AEschylus," was both
prudent and fortunate in leaving it a fragment. To say that "Hyperion"
is after all a semi-artificial utterance of the grand would be harsh,
and ungrateful for so noble an effort of noble faculty; but to say that,
by being prolonged, its grandeur must infallibly have partaken more and
more of an artificial infusion, appears to me criticism entirely sound
and safe.

Mr. Woodhouse has informed us: "The poem, if completed, would have
treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former god of the sun, by
Apollo; and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by
Jupiter, &c., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn's
re-establishment; with other events of which we have but very dark hints
in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact, the incidents
would have been pure creations of the poet's brain." Here again Keats
would have been partly forestalled by Milton: the combat of the Giants
with the Olympian gods must have borne a very appreciable resemblance to
the combat of Satan and his legions with the hosts of heaven. How far
Keats's "invention" would have sufficed to filling in this vast canvas
may be questioned. The precedent of "Endymion," in which he had
attempted something of the same kind, was not wholly encouraging. The
method and tone would of course have been very different; in what
remains of "Hyperion," the general current of diction is as severe as in
"Endymion" it had been florid.

The other commencement of "Hyperion" (alluded to in my sixth chapter)
was a later version, done in November and December 1819; it presents a
great deal of poetic or scenic machinery in which the author's
personality was copiously introduced. This recast contains impressive
things; but the prominence given to the author as spectator or
participant of what he pictures forth was fulsome and fatal. Mr.
Swinburne is in error (along with most other writers) in supposing this
to be the earlier version of the two.

The tragedy of "Otho the Great," written on a peculiar system of
collaboration to which I have already referred, succeeded "Hyperion." It
is a tragedy on the Elizabethan model, and we find in scene i. a curious
instance of Elizabethan contempt of chronology--a reference to
"Hungarian petards." The main factors in the plot are a fierce and
fervent love-passion of the man, and an unscrupulous ambition of the
woman, reddened with crime. Webster may perhaps have been taken by Kea