ince of a consumption: the breaking down of an infirm constitution
having, in all probability, been accelerated by the discarding his neck
cloth, a practice of the cockney poets, who look upon it as essential to
genius, inasmuch as neither Michael Angelo, Raphael or Tasso are
supposed to have worn those antispiritual incumbrances. In short, as the
vigour of Sampson lay in his hair, the secret of talent with these
persons lies in the neck; and what aspirations can be expected from a
mind enveloped in muslin. Keats caught cold in training for a genius,
and, after a lingering illness, died, to the great loss of the
Independents of South America, whom he had intended to visit with an
English epic poem, for the purpose of exciting them to liberty. But
death, even the death of the radically presumptuous profligate, is a
serious thing; and as we believe that Keats was made presumptuous
chiefly by the treacherous puffing of his cockney fellow gossips, and
profligate in his poems merely to make them saleable, we regret that he
did not live long enough to acquire common sense, and abjure the
pestilent and perfidious gang who betrayed his weakness to the grave,
and are now panegyrising his memory into contempt. For what is the
praise of cockneys but disgrace, or what honourable inscription can be
placed over the dead by the hands of notorious libellers, exiled
adulterers, and avowed atheists.

Adonais, an Elegy, is the form in which Mr. Shelley puts forth his woes.
We give a verse at random, premising that there is no story in the
elegy, and that it consists of fifty-five stanzas, which are, to our
seeming, altogether unconnected, interjectional, and nonsensical. We
give one that we think among the more comprehensible. An address to
Urania:--

"Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb;
And _happier they their happiness who knew_,
Whose _tapers yet burn thro' that night of time
In which suns perish'd_; Others more sublime,
Struck by the _envious_ wroth of man or GOD!!
_Have sunk extinct in their refulgent prime_;
And some yet live," &c.----

Now what is the meaning of this, or of any sentence of it, except indeed
that horrid blasphemy which attributes crime to the Great Author of all
virtue! The rest is mere empty absurdity. If it were worth our while to
dilate on the folly of the production, we might find examples of every
species of the ridic