the mind at once to the high tragic tone, that the audience might be ready for the precipitate consummation of guilt in the early part of the play. The true reason for the first appearance of the Witches is to strike the key-note of the character of the whole drama, as is proved by their re-appearance in the third scene, after such an order of the king's as establishes their supernatural power of information. I say information, for so it only is as to Glamis and Cawdor; the "king hereafter" was still contingent still in Macbeth's moral will; although, if he should yield to the temptation, and thus forfeit his free agency, the link of cause and effect more physico would then commence. I need not say that the general idea is all that can be required from the poet,—not a scholastic logical consistency in all the parts so as to meet metaphysical objectors. But O! how truly Shakespearian is the opening of Macbeth's character given in the unpossessedness of Banquo's mind, wholly present to the present object, an unsullied, unscarified mirror! And how strictly true to nature it is that Banquo, and not Macbeth himself, directs our notice to the effect produced on Macbecth's mind, rendered temptable by previous dalliance of the fancy with ambitious thoughts:

Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear
Things that do sound so fair?

And then, again, still unintroitive, addresses the Witches:

I' the name of truth,

Are ye fantastical, or that indeed
Which outwardly ye show?

Banquo's questions are those of natural curiosity, such as a girl would put after hearing a gypsy tell her schoolfellow's fortune,-all perfectly general, or rather planless. But Macbeth, lost in thought, raises himself to speech only by the Witches being about to depart:

Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more:

and all that follows is reasoning on a problem already discussed in his mind,-on a hope which he welcomes, and

the doubts concerning the attainment of which he wishes to have cleared up. Compare his eagerness,—the keen eye with which he has pursued the Witches' evanishing—

Speak, I charge you!

with the easily satisfied mind of the self-uninterested Banquo:

The air hath bubbles, as the water has,

And these are of them:-whither are they vanish'd?

and then Macbeth's earnest reply:

Into the air; and what seem'd corporal melted

As breath into the wind-Would they had stay'd!

Is it too minute to notice the appropriateness of the simile "as breath," etc., in a cold climate?

Still again Banquo goes on wondering, like any common spectator:

Were such things here as we do speak about?

whilst Macbeth persists in recurring to the self-concerning:

Your children shall be kings.

Ban. You shall be king. Macb. And thane of Cawdor too: went it not so?

So surely is the guilt in its germ anterior to the supposed cause, and immediate temptation! Before he can cool, the confirmation of the tempting half of the prophecy arrives, and the concatenating tendency of the imagination is fostered by the sudden coincidence:

Glamis, and thane of Cawdor:

The greatest is behind.

Oppose this to Banquo's simple surprise: "What, can the devil speak true?"

KEATS'S "ENDYMION"

JOHN WILSON CROKER

[This famous review, falsely reputed to have wounded Keats so deeply as to cause his death, appeared in the Quarterly Review for April, 1818. Croker's authorship became known only after many years.]

Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticize. 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,1 and the still more facetious instances of his harmony and sublimity in the verses themselves;

In this Preface Hunt attacked the versification of the school of Pope, and also advocated, like Wordsworth, poetic language "in nothing different from that of real life."

and they will recollect above all the contempt of Pope, Johnson, and such like poetasters and pseudo-critics, which so forcibly contrasted itself with Mr. Leigh Hunt's self-complacent approbation of

all the things itself had wrote,

Of special merit though of little note.'

This author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt; but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. But Mr. Keats has advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples; his nonsense therefore is quite gratuitous; he writes it for its own sake, and, being bitten by Mr. Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry.

Mr. Keats's preface hints that his poem was produced under peculiar circumstances. "Knowing within myself," he says, "the manner in which this poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public. What manner I mean will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished." We humbly beg his pardon, but this does not appear to us to be quite so clear-we really do not know what he means; but the next passage is more intelligible. "The first two books, and indeed the two last, I feel sensible are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press.' Thus "the two first books" are, even in his own judgment, unfit to appear, and "the two last" are, it seems, in the same condition; and as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we have a clear and, we believe, a very just estimate of the entire work.

Mr. Keats, however, deprecates criticism on this "immature and feverish work" in terms which are themselves sufficiently feverish; and we confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him any of the tortures 2 From Churchill's Rosciad, lines 155-6.

of the "fierce hell" of criticism, which terrify his imagination, if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might write more,-if we had not observed in him a certain degree of talent which deserves to be put in the right way, or which at least ought to be warned of the wrong; and if, finally, he had not told us that he is of an age and temper which imperiously require mental discipline.

Of the story we have been able to make out but little; it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion; but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we cannot speak with any degree of certainty, and must therefore content ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and versification; and here again we are perplexed and puzzled. At first it appeared to us that Mr. Keats had been amusing himself and wearying his readers with an immeasurable game at bouts-rimés; 3 but, if we recollect rightly, it is an indispensable condition at this play that the rhymes when filled up shall have a meaning, and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of the ideas but of sounds, and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn.

We shall select, not as the most striking instance, but as that least liable to suspicion, a passage from the opening of the poem.

Such the sun, the moon,

Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon

For simple sheep; and such are daffodils

With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead; etc., etc.

A contest in fitting verses to end-rimes.