appropriated the character, if not the name. His Endymion is not a Greek shepherd, loved by a Grecian goddess; he is merely a young Cockney rhymester, dreaming a phantastic dream at the full of the moon. Costume, were it worth while to notice such a trifle, is violated in every page of this goodly octavo. From his prototype Hunt, John Keats has acquired a sort of vague idea, that the Greeks were a most tasteful people, and that no mythology can be so finely adapted for the purposes of poetry as theirs. It is amusing to see what a hand the two Cockneys make of this mythology; the one confesses that he never read the Greek Tragedians, and the other knows Homer only from Chapman; and both of them write about Apollo, Pan, Nymphs, Muses, and Mysteries, as might be expected from persons of their education. We shall not, however, enlarge at present upon this subject, as we mean to dedicate an entire paper to the classical attainments and attempts of the Cockney poets. As for Mr Keats' " Endymion," it has just as much to do with Greece as it has with "old Tartary the fierce;" no man, whose mind has ever been imbued with the smallest knowledge or feeling of classical poetry or classical history, could have stooped to profane and vulgarise every association in the manner which has been adopted by this 66 son of promise." Before giving any extracts, we must inform our readers, that this romance is meant to be written in English heroic rhyme. To those who have read any of Hunt's poems, this hint might indeed be needless. Mr Keats has adopted the loose, nerveless versification, and Cockney rhymes of the poet of Rimini; but in fairness to that gentleman, we must add, that the defects of the system are tenfold more conspicuous in his disciple's work than in his own. Mr Hunt is a small poet, but he is a clever man. Mr Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of pretty abilities, which he has done every thing in his power to spoil. The poem sets out with the following exposition of the reasons which induced Mr Keats to compose it. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep And such too is the grandeur of the dooms o'ercast, They alway must be with us, or we die. 66 Will trace the story of Endymion ! ! !" Therefore 'tis with full happiness that I After introducing his hero to us in a procession, and preparing us, by a few mystical lines, for believing that his destiny has in it some strange peculiarity, Mr Keats represents the beloved of the Moon as being conveyed by his sister Peona into an island in a river. This young lady has been alarmed by the appearance of the brother, and questioned him thus: "Brother, 'tis vain to hide That thou dost know of things mysterious, Immortal, starry; such alone could thus Weigh down thy nature. Hast thou sinn'd in aught Offensive to the heavenly powers? Caught A Paphian dove upon a message sent ? Thy deathful bow against some deer-herd bent, Sacred to Dian? Haply, thou hast seen Her naked limbs among the alders green; And that, alas! is death. No, I can trace Something more high perplexing in thy face!"" Endymion replies in a long speech, wherein he describes his first meeting with the Moon. We annot mak room for the whole of it, but shall And, sitting down close by, began to muse In passing here, his owlet pinions shook; 66 Until my head was dizzy and distraught. My sight right upward: but it was quite dazed By a bright something, sailing down apace, Whence came that high perfection of all sweetness? Speak, stubborn earth, and tell me where, O where Hast thou a symbol of her golden hair? And they were simply gordian'd up and Leaving, in naked comeliness, unshaded, "She took an airy range, And then, towards me, like a very maid, Came blushing, waning, willing, and afraid, And press'd me by the hand: Ah! 'twas too much; Methought I fainted at the charmed touch, "It was a nymph uprisen to the breast To him her dripping hand she softly kist, Too long, alas, hast thou starv'd on the ruth, My charming rod, my potent river spells; In other regions, past the scanty bar "Thus spake he, and that moment felt en- With power to dream deliciously; so wound The smoothest mossy bed and deepest, where A well-known voice sigh'd, Sweetest, here The world has done its duty. Yet, oh yet, These lovers did embrace, and we must weep "O known Unknown! from whom my being sips Such darling essence, wherefore may I not Be ever in these arms,' &c. And so, like many other romances, terminates the "Poetic Romance" of Johnny Keats, in a patched-up wedding. We had almost forgot to mention, that Keats belongs to the Cockney School of Politics, as well as the Cockney School of Poetry. It is fit that he who holds Rimini to be the first poem, should believe the Examiner to be the first politician of the day. We admire consistency, even in folly. Hear how their bantling has already learned to lisp sedition. "There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen Their baaing vanities, to browse away The comfortable green and juicy hay From human pastures; or, O torturing fact! Who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack'd Fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe Our gold and ripe-ear'd hopes. With not one tinge Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight Save of blown self-applause, they proudly Their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones Amid the fierce intoxicating tones Of trumpets, shoutings, and belaboured drums, And sudden cannon. hums, Ah! how all this In wakeful ears, like uproar past and goneLike thunder clouds that spake to Babylon, And set those old Chaldeans to their tasks.Are then regalities all gilded masks ?" And now, good-morrow to "the Muses' son of Promise;" as for "the feats he yet may do," as we do not pretend to say, like himself, "Muse of my native land am I inspired," we shall adhere to the safe old rule of pauca verba. We venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture £50 upon any thing he can write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, 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. Z. titled to walk before their works, I shall begin with you. The Society by which you seem to have been appointed to examine and comment upon Mr Elliot's plans, has long been regarded by me with great affection and some respect. I became a member of it because I understood that there was an excellent hot supper in the wind every Thursday evening, at the moderate expense of one shilling a head; that Bill Young keeps tolerable rum, and very good Glenlivet whiskey; and that the chair is usually filled by a certain literary friend of ours, whose talents in that department are of the very highest distinction. These were my reasons for entering the Society of Dilettanti; I did not at that period suspect the true nature of the honour to which I had attained: I conceived that your sole object in meeting together was to drink a few sober tumblers of hot toddy, and crack a few good tempered jokes on each other, after the fatigues of the easel or the writingdesk. I by no means knew that you considered yourselves as the arbitri elegantiarum to the "Good Town;" or that you were, in your official capacity, to undertake the support of any such clever and reputable Miscellany as that in which your Report has been inserted. It is, however, a pleasure to be disappointed on the favourable side. I am delighted to find, that your powers of taste are no longer confined, as of old, to deciding on the merits of Davy Bridges' bowls of punch, or Jamie Hogg's pitchers of toddy. The proverb says, that "a work begun is half done." Go on, dear Dilettanti, and there is no saying but in time you may really come to rival the architectural skill of Bailie Johnston himself, although, as yet, certainly you are not worthy to tie the latchet of that accomplished magistrate's shoes. Go on, and prosper. "Novus rerum incipit ordo." You may all be so many Palladios ere you die, although many of you, at the present stage of your progress, will have need, I doubt not, like the before-mentioned Bailie, to turn up Lempriere before you can form any guess what sort of compliment I am paying you when I say so. At present, to tell the plain truth, I fancy a great majority of you are much better acquainted with the flavour of the modern Palla dio's tongues and hams, than with the beauties of his defunct namesake's temples and palaces. I dare say you might have been able to frame a tolerable enough report on the comparative merits of draught or bottled porter, hot or cold punch, Finnan or rizzard haddies, or any thing in that way; but as to gothic architecture and St Giles' cathedral, do not be offended, my dear Committee, if I assure you, that you are publicly esteemed to have gone in this instance, to say the least of it, a little ultra crepidam. Do not, however, be disconcerted or dissatisfied with yourselves. You are really, without flattery, to use the child-bed expression, "doing as well as could have been expected;" your first-born is certainly a poor creature, and cannot survive long, but next time you may have better luck. Rome," as the saying goes, was not built in a day. In process of time, it is undoubtedly within the range of possibility, that the Dilettanti Society may be converted from a drinking and smoking club into an academia dello gusto. You have a longish walk before you; it would never do to lose heart at the first galling of the heel. 66 66 But now for the Report itself; and you will please to observe, I am not, like our good friend Mr George Thomson, writing against it before seeing it. I have really read it with my own eyes, in No XVI. of Blackwood's Magazine, and I honestly tell you, that I consider it by far the most trashy thing that has ever yet appeared in that publication. On looking over the rest of the contents of No XVI. I cannot help suspecting, that the other contributors will be very little flattered with the introduction of the virtuoso stranger into their company. To say nothing of the anonymous authors, whose compositions are stitched up along with yours, I dare say Messrs Wastle, Tickler, and Lauerwinkel-above all, old wicked Timothy, the executioner of your brother Gray-will take your intrusion in high dudgeon. For my own part, I should not wonder if Timothy should cut the concern on the occasion, though I make no doubt the Editor would willingly purchase the continuance of his favours by a promise to sport oak in future against the Dilettanti Committee and all their works. The ab surdity of your opinions is only to be rivalled by the solemn affectation of your high-flown style. Your rumbling long-winded sentences, which look as if they had been measured off upon the ell-wand-your apparent happy self-complacency-your polite contempt of the labours of an accomplished artist, whose merits you are totally incapable of appreciating-all are somewhat original in their way, and must undoubtedly have struck with surprise even the readers of Blackwood's Magazine, well as they have been drilled for these eight or ten months past not to start at trifles. The subject upon which you have been pleased to make your critical debut, is one of some little importance to those who set any value on the appearance of Edinburgh, otherwise I should not have bothered myself with taking any notice of your fine flights. The external part of the church of St Giles is supposed, by all men of sense who have ever seen it, to be about the poorest piece of patchwork extant in this land of "shabby kirks." It is a disgrace to so fine a city as Edinburgh, and the sooner it be got rid of the better. Mr Elliot's plan, which I could almost suspect you have never seen, preserves every thing that is worth preserving in the old exterior, with the exception of one or two little niches; and it gives to the city a beautiful gothic church, in place of a vile ricklety of jails, police offices, shops, and kirks, all jumbled together, with a degree of bold barbarity only to be paralleled by the late and present alterations, on the sister pile of the Parliament House over the way. But the Dilettanti have some fine ideas in their heads about the impropriety of altering ancient buildings any other way than after the Westminster and York method of refacciamento-taking out the old stone, and putting in a new one exactly like it. Truly, opera pretium foret, to take out the old stones of St Giles and put in new ones. The stones so removed and replaced on the buttresses of Henry the Seventh's chapel, are elaborately and exquisitely carved, and therefore worthy of so much trouble. Those of St Giles are only plain black stones, which never saw carving, and therefore, if you have nothing better to propose, you had better let them stay as they are. So much for your criticisms on the exterior. With regard to the interior, I cannot but think you should have been a little more cautious, before you ventured to attack that part of Elliot's design. You might at least have tried your hand, to begin with, on your own hall of assembly in Young's Tavern; the sky-blue ceiling, pink cornices, and transparent linen blinds, of which do little credit either to the Committee under whose inspection it was fitted up, or to Bill himself, who ought to be ashamed to have such a glaring specimen of vulgar taste in his You are for well-frequented house. having 66 two churches in the nave"there is nothing very new in thatand "a hall for music, sculpture, and painting, in the transept!" O most rare Committee of Dilettanti! is it possible that you are the same persons who apostrophise in such moving terms the bones of John Knox, Andrew Melville, and the Covenanters, about two pages before? How would the "Iron eye That saw fair Mary weep in vain," have scowled upon a Committee from a tavern club, who should have waited upon the Bailies of that day with any similar proposal. "Music!" that I can understand-vocal, I suppose, like that of St George's Church, or the psalm concerts. But "painting and statuary!" Why, the very mention of this is horror to any Presbyterian ears. Granting, however, that you had the hall, to do as you please with, let me ask you wherewithal you propose to adorn it? Which of the Edinburgh artists do you mean to employ? I observe Allan's name among your number. Does that elegant artist mean to cover the house of God with luxurious representations of Circassian beauties? Does Mr Schetky propose to furnish its walls with effects from the Pyrenees? Will Williams convert the whole circumference into a panorama of Rome or Athens? Or, will Peter Gibson vouchsafe to occupy a compartment, with a distant view of the rising academy of Dollar?-Or, do you rather wish to fill St Giles with the work of the old masters? You expect, no doubt, that the whole country is to be laid under contribution-that the College of Glasgow are to send you their famous picture of Leda and the Swan |