Life of John Keats Part 22

Here is an impression received in Ireland, followed by a promise, which was fulfilled a few days later with remarkable shrewdness and insight, of further considerations on the contrasts between the Irish character and the Scottish:--

On our return from Belfast we met a sedan--the d.u.c.h.ess of Dunghill. It was no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved from a scarcity of biscuit in its pa.s.sage from Madagascar to the Cape, with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two ragged, tattered girls carried her along. What a thing would be a history of her life and sensations; I shall endeavour when I have thought a little more, to give you my idea of the difference between the Scotch and Irish.

From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns's country, walking along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald and Maybole (the same walk that Stevenson took the reverse way in the winter of 1876) to Ayr.

Brown grows especially lyrical, and Keats more enthusiastic than usual, over the beauty of the first day's walk from Stranraer by Cairn Ryan and Glen App, with Ailsa Craig suddenly looming up through showers after they topped the pa.s.s:--

When we left Cairn [writes Keats] our Road lay half way up the sides of a green mountainous sh.o.r.e, full of clefts of verdure and eternally varying--sometimes up sometimes down, and over little Bridges going across green chasms of moss, rock and trees--winding about everywhere.

After two or three Miles of this we turned suddenly into a magnificent glen finely wooded in Parts--seven Miles long--with a Mountain stream winding down the Midst--full of cottages in the most happy situations--the sides of the Hills covered with sheep--the effect of cattle lowing I never had so finely. At the end we had a gradual ascent and got among the tops of the Mountains whence in a little time I descried in the Sea Ailsa Rock 940 feet high--it was 15 Miles distant and seemed close upon us. The effect of Ailsa with the peculiar perspective of the Sea in connection with the ground we stood on, and the misty rain then falling gave me a complete Idea of a deluge. Ailsa struck me very suddenly--really I was a little alarmed.

Less vivid than the above is the invocatory sonnet, apparently showing acquaintance with the geological theory of volcanic upheaval, which Keats was presently moved to address _To Ailsa Rock_. Coming down into Ballantrae in bl.u.s.tering weather, the friends met a country wedding party on horseback, and Keats tried a song about it in the Burns dialect, for Brown to palm off on Dilke as an original: 'but it won't do,' he rightly decides. From Maybole he writes to Reynolds with pleased antic.i.p.ation of the visit to be paid the next day to Burns's cottage.

'One of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine as the cottage of Burns--we need not think of his misery--that is all gone--bad luck to it--I shall look upon it all with unmixed pleasure, as I do upon my Stratford-on-Avon day with Bailey.' On the walk from Maybole to Ayr Keats has almost the only phrase which escapes him during the whole tour to indicate a sense of special inspiring power in mountain scenery for a poet:--'The approach to it [Ayr] is extremely fine--quite outwent my expectations--richly meadowed, wooded, heathed, and rivuleted--with a Grand Sea view terminated by the black mountains of the Isle of Arran. As soon as I saw them so nearly I said to myself, "How is it they did not beckon Burns to some grand attempt at an Epic."'

Nearing Kirk Alloway, Keats had been delighted to find the first home of Burns in a landscape so charming. 'I endeavoured to drink in the Prospect, that I might spin it out to you, as the Silkworm makes silk from Mulberry leaves--I cannot recollect it.' But his antic.i.p.ations were deceived, the whole scene disenchanted, and thoughts of Burns's misery forced on him in his own despite, by the presence and chatter of the man in charge of the poet's birthplace:--

The Man at the Cottage was a great Bore with his Anecdotes--I hate the rascal--his life consists in fuz, fuzzy, fuzziest. He drinks gla.s.ses five for the Quarter and twelve for the hour--he is a mahogany-faced old Jacka.s.s who knew Burns. He ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him. He calls himself 'a curious old b.i.t.c.h'--but he is a flat old dog--I should like to employ Caliph Vathek to kick him. O the flummery of a birthplace! Cant! cant! cant! It is enough to give a spirit the guts-ache. Many a true word, they say, is spoken in jest--this may be because his gab hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet. My dear Reynolds--I cannot write about scenery and visitings--Fancy is indeed less than a present palpable reality, but it is greater than remembrance--you would lift your eyes from _Homer_ only to see close before you the real Isle of Tenedos--you would rather read _Homer_ afterwards than remember yourself. One song of Burns's is of more worth to you than all I could think for a whole year in his native country. His Misery is a dead weight upon the nimbleness of one's quill--I tried to forget it--to drink Toddy without any Care--to write a merry sonnet--it won't do--he talked with b.i.t.c.hes--he drank with blackguards, he was miserable. We can see horribly clear, in the works of such a Man his whole life, as if we were G.o.d's spies.[4] What were his addresses to Jean in the latter part of his life?

A little farther back Keats had written, 'my head is sometimes in such a whirl in considering the million likings and antipathies of our Moments that I can get into no settled strain in my Letters.' But their straggling, careless tissue is threaded with such strands of genius and fresh human wisdom that one often wonders whether they are not legacies of this rare young spirit equally precious with the poems themselves.

Certainly their prose is better than most of the verse which he had strength or leisure to write during this Scottish tour. As the two friends tramped among the Highland mountains some days later Keats composed with considerable pains (as Brown particularly mentions) the lines beginning 'There is a charm in footing slow across a silent plain,' intended to express the temper in which his pilgrimage through and beyond the Burns country had been made. They are written in the long iambic fourteeners of Chapman's _Iliad_, a metre not touched by Keats elsewhere, and perhaps chosen to convey a sense of the sustained continuous trudge of his wayfaring. They are very interesting as an attempt to capture and fix in words certain singular, fluctuating intensities of the poet's mood--the pressure of a great and tragic memory absorbing his whole consciousness and deadening all sense of outward things as he nears the place of pilgrimage--and afterwards his momentary panic lest the spell of mighty scenery and a.s.sociations may be too overpowering and drag his soul adrift from its moorings of every-day habit and affection--from the ties of 'the sweet and bitter world'--'of Brother's eyes, of Sister's brow.' In some of the lines expressing these obscure disturbances of the soul there is a deep smouldering fire, but hardly ever that touch of absolute felicity which is the note of Keats's work when he is quite himself. The best, technically speaking, are those which tell of the pilgrim's absorbed mood of expectant approach to his goal:--

Light heather-bells may tremble then but they are far away; Wood-lark may sing from sandy fern,--the Sun may hear his lay; Runnels may kiss the gra.s.s on shelves and shallows clear, But their low voices are not heard, though come on travels drear; Blood-red the Sun may set behind black mountain peaks; Blue tides may sluice and drench their time in caves and weedy creeks; Eagles may seem to sleep wing-wide upon the air; Ring-doves may fly convuls'd across to some high-cedar'd lair; But the forgotten eye is still fast lidded to the ground, As Palmer's, that with weariness, mid-desert shrine hath found.

At such a time the soul's a child, in childhood is the brain; Forgotten is the worldly heart--alone, it beats in vain.--[5]

Keats makes it clear that he did not write these lines until some days after he had left Burns's country and was well on into the heart of the Highlands, and we get what reads like the prose of some of them in a letter written to Tom on the last stage of his walk before reaching Oban. Meantime the friends had pa.s.sed through Glasgow, of which they had nothing to say except that they were taken, not for the first time, for pedlars by reason of their knapsacks, and Brown in particular for a spectacle-seller by reason of his gla.s.ses, and that the whole population seemed to have turned out to stare at them. A drunken man in the street, accosting Keats with true Glaswegian lack of ceremony, vowed he had seen all kinds of foreigners but never the like o' _him_: a remark perhaps not to be wondered at when we recall Mrs Dilke's description of Keats's appearance when he came home (see the end of this chapter) and Brown's account of his own weird toggery as follows:--'a thick stick in my hand, the knapsack on my back, "with spectacles on nose," a white hat, a tartan coat and trousers and a Highland plaid thrown over my shoulders.'

From Glasgow they walked by Dumbarton through the Loch Lomond country, round the head of Loch Fyne to Inverary, thence down the side and round the south-west end of Loch Awe and so past the head of Loch Craignish to the coast. At his approach to the lower end of Loch Lomond Keats had thought the scene 'precious good;' but his sense of romance was disturbed by finding it so frequented. 'Steamboats on Loch Lomond and Barouches on its sides take a little from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as Brown and I.' If the scene were to be peopled he would prefer that it were by another kind of denizen. 'The Evening was beautiful nothing could surpa.s.s our fortune in the weather--yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet of chivalry Barges with Trumpets and Banners just to die away before me into that blue place among the mountains'--and here follows a little sketch of the narrow upper end of the lake from near Tarbet, just to show where the blue place was. At Inverary Keats has a word about the woods which reminds one of Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_--'the woods seem old enough to remember two or three changes in the Crags above them'--and then goes on to tell how he has been amused and exasperated by a performance of _The Stranger_ to an accompaniment of bagpipe music. Bathing in Loch Fyne the next morning, he got horribly bitten by gad-flies, and vented his smart in a set of doggrel rhymes. Of all these matters he gossips gaily for the entertainment of the invalid Tom. Turning on the same day to write to Benjamin Bailey, the most serious-minded of his friends, he proceeds in a strain of considerate self-knowledge to confess and define some of the morbid elements in his own nature. That Bailey may be warned against taking any future complainings of his too seriously, 'I carry all matters,' he says, 'to an extreme--so that when I have any little vexation, it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles.' And then by way of accounting for his having failed of late to see much of the Reynolds sisters in Little Britain, he lays bare his reasons for thinking himself unfit for ordinary society and especially for the society of women:--

I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women--at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure G.o.ddess, my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to expect more than their reality--I thought them ethereal above men--I find them perhaps equal--great by comparison is very small. Insult may be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of being insulted does not like to think an insult against another. I do not like to think insults in a lady's company--I commit a crime with her which absence would not have known.... I must absolutely get over this--but how? the only way is to find the root of the evil, and so cure it 'with backward mutters of dissevering power'--that is a difficult thing; for an obstinate Prejudice can seldom be produced but from a gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to unravel, and care to keep unravelled.

And then, as to his present doings and impressions:--

I should not have consented to myself these four months tramping in the highlands, but that I thought it would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use me to more hards.h.i.+ps, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among books, even though I should reach _Homer_. By this time I am comparatively a Mountaineer. I have been among wilds and mountains too much to break out much about their grandeur. I have fed upon oat-cake--not long enough to be very much attached to it.--The first mountains I saw, though not so large as some I have since seen, weighed very solemnly upon me. The effect is wearing away--yet I like them mainly.

The word 'identify' in the above is noticeable, as seeming to imply that the fruit of his travel was not discovery, but only the recognition of scenes already fully preconceived in his imagination. Resuming his letter to Tom at a later stage, he tells of things that have impressed him: how in Glencroe[6] they had been pleased with the noise of shepherds' sheep and dogs in the misty heights close above them, but could see none of them for some time, till two came in sight 'creeping among the crags like Emmets,' yet their voices plainly audible: how solemn was the first sight of Loch Awe as they approached it 'along a complete mountain road' (that is by way of Glen Aray) 'where if one listened there was not a sound but that of mountain streams'; how they tramped twenty miles by the loch side and how the next day they had reached the coast within view of Long Island (that is Luing; the spot was probably Kilmelfort). It is at this point we get the prose of some of the lines quoted above from the verses expressing the temper of his pilgrimage:--

Our walk was of this description--the near Hills were not very lofty but many of them steep, beautifully wooded--the distant Mountains in the Hebrides very grand, the Salt.w.a.ter Lakes coming up between Crags and Islands full tide and scarcely ruffled--sometimes appearing as one large Lake sometimes as three distinct ones in different directions.

At one point we saw afar off a rocky opening into the main sea.--We have also seen an Eagle or two. They move about without the least motion of Wings when in an indolent fit.

At the same point occur for the first time complaints, slight at first, of fatigue and discomfort. At the beginning of his tour Keats had written to his sister of its effects upon his appet.i.te: 'I get so hungry a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to me.... I can eat a bull's head as easily as I used to do bull's eyes.' Some days later he writes that he is getting used to it, and doing his twenty miles or more a day without inconvenience. But now, in the remoter parts of the Highlands, the hard accommodation and monotonous diet and rough journeys and frequent drenchings begin to tell upon both him and Brown:--

Last night poor Brown with his feet blistered and scarcely able to walk, after a trudge of 20 Miles down the side of Loch Awe had no supper but Eggs and oat Cake--we have lost the sight of white bread entirely--Now we had eaten nothing but eggs all day--about 10 a piece and they had become sickening--To-day we have fared rather better--but no oat Cake wanting--we had a small chicken and even a good bottle of Port but altogether the fare is too coa.r.s.e--I feel it a little.

Our travellers seem to have felt the hards.h.i.+ps of the Highlands more than either Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy when they visited the same scenes just fifteen years earlier, or Lockhart and his brother in their expedition, only three years before, to the loneliest wilds of Lochaber.

But then the Wordsworth party only walked when they wished, and drove much of the way in their ramshackle jaunting-car; and the Lockharts, being fishermen, had their rods, and had besides brought portable soup with them and a horse to carry their kit. Lockhart's account of his experience is in curious contrast with those of Keats and Brown:--

We had a horse with us for the convenience of carrying baggage--but contemning the paths of civilized man, we dared the deepest glens in search of trout. There is something abundantly delightful in the warmheartedness of the Highland people. Bating the article of inquisitiveness, they are as polite as courtiers. The moment we entered a cottage the wife began to bake her cakes--and having portable soup with us, our fare was really excellent. What think you of porritch and cream for breakfast? trout, pike, and herrings for dinner, and right peat-reek whisky?

Arrived at Oban by way of the Melfort pa.s.s and Glen Euchar, the friends undertook one journey in especial which proved too much for Keats's strength. Finding the regular tourist route by water to Staffa and Iona too expensive for their frugal scheme of travel, they were persuaded to take the ferry to the isle of Kerrera and thence on to the hither sh.o.r.e of Mull. Did Keats in crossing Kerrera hear of--he would scarcely have travelled out of his way to visit--the ruins of the castle of Goylen on its precipice above the sea, with its legend of the girl-child, unaccountably puny as was thought, who turned out to be really the fairy mistress of a gentleman of Ireland, and being detected as such threw herself headlong from the window into the waves? and was this scene with its story in his mind when he wrote of forlorn fairy lands where castle cas.e.m.e.nts open on the foam of perilous seas?[7] From the landing place in Mull they had to take a guide and traverse on foot the whole width of the island to the extreme point of the Ross of Mull opposite Iona: a wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of some thirty-seven miles, over difficult ground and in the very roughest weather, broken by one night's rest in a shepherd's hut at a spot he calls Dun an Cullen,--perhaps for Derrynacullen. Having crossed the narrow channel to Iona and admired the antiquities of that ill.u.s.trious island (the epithet is Johnson's), they chartered a fresh boat for the trip to Staffa and thence up Loch na Keal, so landing on the return journey in the heart of Mull and shortening their walk back across the island by more than half. By the power of the past and its a.s.sociations among the monastic ruins of Iona, and of nature's architecture in building and scooping the basaltic columns of Fingal's Cave, Keats shows himself naturally impressed. In this instance, and once or twice afterwards, he exerts himself to write a full and precise description for the benefit of his brother Tom. In doing so he uses a phrase which indicates a running of his thoughts upon his projected poem, _Hyperion_:--

The finest thing is Fingal's cave--it is entirely a hollowing out of Basalt Pillars. Suppose now the Giants who rebelled against Jove had taken a whole Ma.s.s of black Columns and bound them together like bunches of matches--and then with immense Axes had made a cavern in the body of these Columns--of course the roof and floor must be composed of the broken ends of the Columns--such is Fingal's cave except that the Sea has done the work of excavations and is continually das.h.i.+ng there--so that we walk along the sides of the cave on the pillars which are left as if for convenient stairs--the roof is arched somewhat gothic-wise and the length of some of the entire side-pillars is 50 feet.... The colour of the columns is a sort of black with a lurking gloom of purple therein. For solemnity and grandeur it far surpa.s.ses the finest Cathedral.

More characteristically than this description, some verses he sends at the same time tell how Fingal's cave and its profanation by the race of tourists affected him: I mean those beginning 'Not Aladdin Magian,'

written in the seven-syllable metre which he handled almost as well as his sixteenth and seventeenth century masters, from Fletcher and Ben Jonson to the youthful Milton. Avoiding word-painting and description, like the born poet he is, he begins by calling up for comparison visions of other fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then, bethinking himself of Milton's cry to Lycidas,

where'er thy bones are hurl'd, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides--

he imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity of Ocean and put by him in charge of this cathedral of his building. In his priestly character Lycidas tells his latter-day visitant of the religion of the place, complains of the violation of its solitude, and then dives suddenly from view. In the six lines which tell of the scene's profanation the style sinks with the theme into flat triviality:--

So for ever will I leave Such a taint and soon unweave All the magic of the place, Tis now free to stupid face, To cutters and to Fas.h.i.+on boats, To cravats and to Petticoats:-- The great sea shall war it down, For its fame shall not be blown At each farthing Quadrille dance.

So saying with a Spirit glance He dived--.

Keats evidently, and no wonder, did not like those six lines from 'Tis now free' to 'dance': in transcripts by his friends they are dropped out or inserted only in pencil: but he apparently did not see his way to mend them, and Brown tells us he could never persuade him to finish or resume the poem. In the broken close as he left it there is after all an appropriate abruptness which may content us.

From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scottish tour, and especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first distinct and settled symptoms of failure in Keats's health, which by reason of his muscular vigour had to his friends. .h.i.therto seemed so robust, and of the development of his hereditary tendency to consumption. In the same letter to his brother Tom which contains the transcript of the Fingal poem he speaks of a 'slight sore throat,'--Brown calls it a violent cold,--which compelled him to rest for a day or two at Oban. Thence they pushed on in broken weather by Ballachulish and the sh.o.r.e of Loch Linnhe to Fort William, and from thence groped and struggled up Ben Nevis, a toilsome climb at best, in a dissolving mist. Once again Keats makes an exceptional endeavour to realise the scene in words for his brother's benefit, telling of the continual s.h.i.+fting and opening and closing and re-opening of the cloud veils about them; and to clench his effect adds, 'There is not a more fickle thing than the top of a Mountain--what would a Lady give to change her headdress as often and with as little trouble?' Seated, so Brown tells us, almost on the edge of a precipice of fifteen hundred feet drop, Keats composed a sonnet, above his worst but much below his best, turning the experience of the hour into a simple enough symbol of his own mental state in face of the great mysteries of things:--

Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist!

I look into the chasms, and a shroud Vap'rous doth hide them,--just so much I wist Mankind do know of h.e.l.l; I look o'erhead, And there is sullen mist,--even so much Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread Before the earth, beneath me,--even such, Even so vague is man's sight of himself!

Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet,-- Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf, I tread on them,--that all my eye doth meet Is mist and crag, not only on this height, But in the world of thought and mental might!

Hearing of a previous ascent by a Mrs Cameron, 'the fattest woman in all Inverness.h.i.+re,' he had the energy to compose also for Tom's amus.e.m.e.nt a comic dialogue in verse between the mountain and the lady, much more in Brown's vein than in his own. By the 6th of August the travellers had reached Inverness, having tramped, as Brown calculates, six hundred and forty-two miles since leaving Lancaster.

Keats's throat had for some time been getting worse: the ascent, and especially the descent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses, shaken and tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at Inverness thought his condition seriously threatening, and forbad him to continue his tour. Accordingly he gave up the purpose with which he had set out of footing it southward by a different route, seeing Edinburgh, and on his way home visiting Bailey at his curacy in c.u.mberland, and decided to take pa.s.sage at once for London by the next packet from Cromarty. Dilke had in the meantime felt compelled to write and recall him on account of a sudden change for the worse in the condition of the invalid Tom, so that his tour with Brown would have been cut short in any case. On their way round the head of Beauly Firth to Cromarty the friends did not miss the opportunity of visiting the ruins of Beauly Abbey. The interior was then and for long afterwards used as a burial place and receptacle for miscellaneous rubbish. Their attention being drawn to a heap of skulls which they took, probably on the information of some local guide, for skulls of ancient monks of the Abbey, they jointly composed upon them a set of verses in Burns's favourite measure (but without, this time, any attempt at his dialect). Unluckily Brown wrote the lion's share of the piece and set the tone of the whole. To the sixteen stanzas Keats contributed, as he afterwards informed Woodhouse, only the first line-and-a-half of the first stanza, with three of the later stanzas entire. As the piece has never been published and is a new doc.u.ment in the history of the tour, it seems to call for insertion here: but in view of its length and lack of quality (for it has nowhere a touch of Keats's true magic) I choose rather to relegate it to an appendix.

It was on the eighth or ninth of August that the smack for London put out from Cromarty with Keats on board, and Brown, having bidden him goodbye, was left to finish the tour alone--'much lamenting,' says he, 'the loss of his beloved companions.h.i.+p at my side.' Keats in some degree picked up strength during a nine days' sea pa.s.sage, the humours of which he afterwards described pleasantly in a letter to his brother George.

But his throat trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or for any length of time left him afterwards. On the 18th of August he arrived at Hampstead, and made his appearance among his friends the next day, 'as brown and as shabby as you can imagine,' writes Mrs Dilke, 'scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell what he looked like.' When he found himself seated, for the first time after his hards.h.i.+ps, in a comfortable stuffed chair, we are told how he expressed a comic enjoyment of the sensation, quoting at himself the words in which Quince the carpenter congratulates his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This account was published in _The Plymouth and Devonport Weekly Journal_, beginning October 1, 1840, but was unluckily stopped after the fourth number and carries us no farther than to Ballantrae on the Ayrs.h.i.+re coast. I believe this is the first time that it has been used or quoted.

[2] Does the reader remember how in a similar scene from the other side of the Solway, in Scott's _Redgauntlet_, Dame Martin, leading the dance, 'frisked like a kid, snapped her fingers like castanets, whooped like a Baccha.n.a.l, and bounded from the floor like a tennis ball'?

[3] It is interesting to note that the present poet laureate has found something in this piece ent.i.tling it to a place in his severely sifted anthology, _The Spirit of Man_.

[4] The words are King Lear's (act v, sc. iii).

[5] This metre is essentially the same as the 'common' measure, eight and six, of the hymn-books, only printed out in single lines to be spoken without--or with only very slight--pause. At the point quoted Keats varies it, whether carelessly or on purpose, and the first lines of three successive couplets, beginning from 'Runnels,' etc., are not in fourteeners but in twelves or Alexandrines (='short measure,' six and six, printed out). A similar variation is frequent in early examples of the metre.

[6] Printed in error 'Glenside' in all the editions: but the MS. is quite clear, and even were it not so topography would require Glencroe.

[7] See John Campbell of Islay, _Popular Tales of the West Highlands_ (1860), vol. ii, p. 52. I owe the suggestion and the reference to my friend Prof. W. P. Ker. Personally I have always a.s.sociated the magic cas.e.m.e.nts with the Enchanted Castle of Claude's picture representing a very different scene. But the poet's mind is a crucible made for extracting from ingredients no matter how heterogeneous the quintessence, the elixir, which it needs.

CHAPTER X

SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 1818: _BLACKWOOD_ AND THE _QUARTERLY_

_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_--Partisan excesses--Wild inconsistency--Virulences of first number--The 'Z' papers and Leigh Hunt--Blackwood and Walter Scott--_The Chaldee Ma.n.u.script_--Scott's warning to Lockhart--Lockhart and Keats--'Z' on _Endymion_--A lesson to critics--Marks of Lockhart's hand--The Quarterly on _Endymion_--Indignant friends: Bailey--Reynolds--Woodhouse and Taylor--Keats's composure under attack--Subsequent effects--Tom Keats _in extremis_--Three months by the sick-bed--First Journal-letter to America--Dread of love and marriage--Death of Tom Keats.