... The frenzy of the _Poems_ [Keats's first volume, 1817] was bad
enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the
calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of _Endymion_.... We
hope however that, in so young a person and with a constitution
originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable....
Mr. Hunt is a small poet, but a clever man; Mr. Keats is a still smaller
poet, and he is only a boy of pretty abilities which he has done
everything in his power to spoil.... It is a better and wiser thing to
be a starved apothecary than a starved poet: so back to the shop, Mr.
John, back to "plaster, pills, and ointment-boxes," &c. But for Heaven's
sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and
soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.'
Even the death of Keats, in 1821, did not abate the rancour of
_Blackwood's Magazine_. Witness the following extracts. (1823) 'Keats
had been dished--utterly demolished and dished--by _Blackwood_ long
before Mr. Gifford's scribes mentioned his name.... But let us hear no
more of Johnny Keats.
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