laughing at the mock solemnity
with which Shelley charges the Quarterly Review for having murdered his
friend with--a critique![N] If criticism killed the disciples of that
school, Shelley would not have been alive to write an Elegy on
another:--but the whole is most farcical from a pen which on other
occasions, has treated of the soul, the body, life and death agreeably
to the opinions, the principles, and the practice of Percy Bysshe
Shelley.--_The Literary Gazette_.

[Footnote M: Though there is _no Echo_ and the mountains are
_voiceless_, the woodmen, nevertheless, in the last line of this verse
hear "a drear murmur between their Songs!!"]

[Footnote N: This would have done excellently for a coroner's inquest
like that on _Honey_, which lasted _thirty_ days, and was facetiously
called the "Honey-moon."]

JOHN KEATS

_Endymion: A Poetic Romance_. By John Keats. London. 1818. pp. 207.

Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which
they affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall anticipate
the author's complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his
work. Not that we have been wanting in our duty--far from it--indeed, we
have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to
be, to get through it; but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance,
we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond
the first of the four books of which this Poetic Romance consists. We
should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on
our parts, were it not for one consolation--namely, that we are no
better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we have so
painfully toiled, than we are with that of the three which we have not
looked into.

It is not that Mr. Keats, (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt
that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody,)
it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of
fancy, and gleams of genius--he has all these; but he is unhappily a
disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney
poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in
the most uncouth language.

Of this school, Mr. Leigh Hunt, as we observed in a former Number,
aspires to be the hierophant. Our readers will recollect the pleasant
recipes for harmonious and sublime poetry which he gave us in his
preface to 'Rimini,' a