etty well satisfied as to the
meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines. We now present
them with some of the new words with which, in imitation of Mr. Leigh
Hunt, he adorns our language.

'We are told that turtles _passion_ their voices; that an arbour was
_nested_, and a lady's locks _gordianed_ up; and, to supply the place of
the nouns thus verbalized, Mr. Keats, with great fecundity, spawns new
ones, such as men-slugs and human _serpentry_, the _honey-feel_ of
bliss, wives prepare _needments_, and so forth.

'Then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their
natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads. Thus
the wine out-sparkled, the multitude up-followed, and night up-took: the
wind up-blows, and the hours are down-sunken. But, if he sinks some
adverbs in the verbs, he compensates the language with adverbs and
adjectives which he separates from the parent stock. Thus a lady
whispers _pantingly_ and close, makes _hushing_ signs, and steers her
skiff into a _ripply_ cove, a shower falls _refreshfully_, and a vulture
has a _spreaded_ tail.

'But enough of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte. If any one should
be bold enough to purchase this Poetic Romance, and so much more patient
than ourselves as to get beyond the first book, and so much more
fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted
with his success. We shall then return to the task which we now abandon
in despair, and endeavour to make all due amends to Mr. Keats and to our
readers.'

This criticism is not, I think, exactly what Shelley called it in the
Preface to _Adonais_--'savage:' it is less savage than contemptuous, and
is far indeed from competing with the abuse which was from time to time,
and in various reviews, poured forth upon Shelley himself. It cannot be
denied that some of the blemishes which it points out in _Endymion_ are
real blemishes, and very serious ones. The grounds on which one can
fairly object to the criticism are that its tone is purposely
ill-natured; its recognition of merits scanty out of all proportion to
its censure of defects; and its spirit that of prepense disparagement
founded not so much on the poetical errors of Keats as on the fact that
he was a friend of Leigh Hunt, the literary and also the political
antagonist of the _Quarterly Review_. The editor, Mr. Gifford, seems
always to have been regarded as the author of this criticism--I presume,