notice of the life and poetry of Shelley.

I shall not here enter upon a consideration of the cancelled passages of
_Adonais_: they will appear more appositely further on (see pp. 92-94,
&c.). I therefore conclude the present section by quoting the _Quarterly
Review_ article upon _Endymion_--omitting only a few sentences which do
not refer directly to Keats, but mostly to Leigh Hunt:--

'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.

'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.