The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎50r] (104/244)

1892 THE STORY OF GIFFO 589
Of the story [he says] 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 in
stances of its diction and versification.
The rest of the article, accordingly, consists of an attack upon
Keats, illustrated by two quotations, for the occult waywardness and
capriciousness of his style, the evident dependence of the sequence of
his fancies on the mere rhymes that have occurred to him, followed
by examples of what the Eeviewer considers lines of incorrect and
limping prosody and by examples of what he regards as untasteful
words and phrases. Among the last he quotes ' turtles passion their
voices,' ' men-slugs and human serpentry,' ' honey-feel of bliss,' the
' multitude upfollowed,' ' pantingly and close,' ' a ripply cove,' ' re-
freshfully,' and others. Save that it is all done rather stupidly and in
an ill-natured spirit, the specification here of Keats's chief faults is not
very different from that which has been made over and over again,
and would be still allowed, by some of Keats's most ardent admirers.
Bitter and ill-natured the whole article certainly was, and such as
could not fail to annoy any eager young author, and depress him for
a day or two; but surely, as Byron thought, not such as any author
with ' a stalk of carl-hemp' in him would have permitted himself to
be killed by. Scores of very savage articles on new books appear
every month now-a-days in our newspapers and literary reviews,
without killing the authors of the books, or even putting them in
misery beyond the first four-and-twenty hours ; and the literary
savagery of the world in which Keats lived was more reckless-
and outrageous than anything of the sort known now. Keats had
only to look about him to see poets who had been slaughtered over
and over again in reviews surviving the slaughter comfortably enough,
or even radiantly and smilingly. For fifteen years, as he knew, there-
had been a systematic series of attacks on Wordsworth by Jeffrey in
the Edinburgh Review a hundred times more ferocious than this
poor four-page article on himself in the ; and yet there was
Wordsworth going about in the Lake district of his habitation as hale
and serene as ever, climbing mountains and leading otherwise his
customary open-air life as heartily as if no Jeffrey existed, and, when
he did chance to come to London, welcomed and pressed round in the
selectest circle of Keats's own acquaintance there as the greatest
English poet of his time, as a sage, a non-such, almost a demigod.
So, in varying degrees, with the Laureate Southey and others, all of
whom had been similarly mauled by the Eeviewers. Nay, and
this is a fact in the history of the case that has been strangely for
gotten or overlooked,—if Keats could have been killed by a savage
review of his Endymion, he ought to have been dead before this one
saw the light. The small article in the as we have seen.
VOL. XXXI—NO. 182 S S