It is so far a fortunate thing that this piece of impious and utter absurdity can have little circulation in Britain. The copy in our hands is one of some score sent to the Author's intimates from Pisa, where it has been printed in a quarto form "with the types of Didot," and two learned Epigraphs from Plato and Moschus. Solemn as the subject is, (for in truth we must grieve for the early death of any youth of literary ambition,) it is hardly possible to help laughing at the mock solemnity with which Shelley charges the Quarterly Review for having murdered his friend with--a critique![N] If criticism killed the disciples of that school, Shelley would not have been alive to write an Elegy on another:--but the whole is most farcical from a pen which on other occasions, has treated of the soul, the body, life and death agreeably to the opinions, the principles, and the practice of Percy Bysshe Shelley.--_The Literary Gazette_.
[Footnote M: Though there is _no Echo_ and the mountains are _voiceless_, the woodmen, nevertheless, in the last line of this verse hear "a drear murmur between their Songs!!"]
[Footnote N: This would have done excellently for a coroner's inquest like that on _Honey_, which lasted _thirty_ days, and was facetiously called the "Honey-moon."]
_Endymion: A Poetic Romance_. By John Keats. London. 1818. pp. 207.
Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticise. 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.