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dant qualities, which unfit them for purely and French beans, he deprecates the Conauxiliary and subsidary flavours. Take the tinental fashion of sending them round potato. Undoubtedly it has not positive- solemnly as substantive dishes, as if deness (positivität) enough for isolated con- serving, and, indeed, demanding a separate sumption. Even when mashed and reduced individual state of consciousness for the apby complete attrition and the agency of preciation of them, and lays it down that butter and milk to that sublimated form in both cauliflower and French beans are really which potatoes are handed round by some of that subsidiary class of foods which are Continental cooks for separate eating, no too deficient in positiveness of flavour for one can deny that there is a certain neu- self-sufficiency (Selbstständigkeit). On the trality of flavour which is almost as unsatis-other hand, he approves in the most emfactory as, to a truly artistic eye, a drab- phatic manner of the universal combination coloured dress. But yet there is almost as of salad with chicken which characterizes much to be said against the practice of using the Continental cuisine,- both of France potatoes as mere auxiliaries to meat. It is and of Germany. Every stranger on the true that they have auxiliary flavours, of Continent has noticed that salad and chicken the same order as bread, which serve as a go as invariably together, as horse-radish very good foil to the more positive quali- and beef in England. The present writer ties of beef or mutton,- that is not disputed; has often been puzzled by this phenomenon, but then they have so much beyond this, for which there seems to be less obvious so much that merely repeats the foody and, cause than for the grouping of the hot and so to say, heavy, prosaic, dead-labour char- biting flavour of horse-radish in the same acter of meat, instead of supplementing and unit of flavour, the same state of " palatecompleting it. What you want in a true consciousness" Gaumen-Bewusstseyn) as the auxiliary flavour to the meat is not so much German Professor accurately, if somewhat what will shade off and graduate the other- pedantically, calls it, with the rich and wise too positive and dominant taste of the yet tenacious fibre of roast beef. One can animal fibre into faint vegetable flavours, understand why a keen and biting heat like as something, like the white margin of a that of horse-radish is specially suitable to picture, that will set it off by contrast, and the richness and tenacity of beef, though it relieve it by giving the sense of ample space would not be at all equally suitable to the and room. Now it is only a very small richness of pork, which melts away, as it part of the flavour of potato of which this were, and becomes evanescent, offering too can be truly said: there is much redun- little resistance to so dominant an auxiliary dant flavour which is nothing but a reitera- flavour as that of horse-radish. But we tion of the uphill work of real eating. never saw equally clearly, till we read the Hence the difficulty,-what to do with po- great German's treatise, why the traditional tato, which is on the border line between association of roast chicken and salad which an auxiliary and a substantive food? Un- prevails on the Continent has satisfied so doubtedly the true solution is likely to be completely the demands of the most highly found in the direction of combining it with educated palates of our century. Englishetherealized essences of meat stripped of men usually associate salad with cold roast their fibrine, appetite-satisfying character, beef, a dish unknown abroad in any sense but the perfect solution has not been reached. in which an Englishman understands the Tiefdenken thinks he sees more scientific term,- and we still lean to the national insight in the bias of the Continent, and prejudice. Tiefdenken defends his view, also, as he reminds us, of the Irish Celts, however, thus: - he subdivides flavours in this, as in so many other things, show- into those which may be called (1) absoing their kinship with the French as distin- lutely subsidiary and incapable of substanguished from the heavy Saxon genius,- tive existence, like condiments and faint for treating it as a substantive food, than in vegetables; (2) substantive-subsidiary, like the heavy and rather carnal English fash- most of the stronger green vegetables (spiion of allowing it to reduplicate and thicken nach, for instance), i.e., those which though, by its redundant fibre, the natural stoggi- on the whole, subsidiary, are on the verge ness of meat. The preference of the Con- of substantive flavours; and (3) subsidiarytinental cooks for serving pototoes, when substantive, like potatoes, salad, and a few they use them as an auxiliary and subsidiary of the fainter species of white meats, such dish at all, chiefly with the lighter textures, as chicken, which, though on the whole subsuch as fish, rather than with the heavy stantive, and capable of occupying, though textures of beef, mutton, and veal, is there- not perfectly, a complete state of palatefore earnestly justified by Tiefdenken. On consciousness, yet have so many lacunæ of the other hand, in the case of cauliflower | flavour in them as to be capable also of still

more perfect use in combination with other | Keats strove so constantly to kindle a fire complementary flavours. Now he lays it of passion around everything that he saw or down as a great canon that though the sub- thought of. Through Hunt he became acstantive-subsidiary flavours always need quainted with Hazlitt, Shelley, Haydon, combination with a flavour more substan- and Godwin, and the encouragement of such tive, and can never be reinforced by each companionship did much to prompt him to other,― spinach, for instance, not being efforts which he might have hesitated to capable of any combination with artichoke make had he remained amongst the suror any other flavour of the substantive-sub-roundings in which he was born. sidiary class, so as to form a complete state of palate-consciousness, the subsidiarysubstantive flavours, if of different orders, like a white meat and a vegetable, will coalesce perfectly into a single state of palateconsciousness, and this the more, if the difference of order be so great that the white meat is best eaten hot, and the vegetable cold, or vice versa.

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The author of the book before us, while approaching his task in a reverent spirit enough, appears to indulge in a niminypiminy criticism not altogether worthy of his subject. A great deal too much has been already said upon what is termed the slovenliness and incompleteness of what Keats has left us. Lord Houghton even says he did not escape the charge of sacGrant Tiefdenken's theory, and his ex- rificing beauty to supposed intensity, and of planation is really admirable. But, after all, merging the abiding grace of his song in the we must remember that his theory is as yet passionate phantasies of the moment." We only the induction of a profound and acute prefer the " passionate phantasies" to the mind from a great number of facts presented abiding grace"(whatever it means,) and to a sensitive and highly educated palate- simply because Keats himself did best in consciousness. Why, if Tiefdenken's theory following his own drift. Nor do we believe is true, do the most cultivated palates of it to be true, as Lord Houghton again inEngland revolt from potato with fish,- sists, that he was the worse for his love of which is precisely a case of the union of two Spenser and his introduction of phrases subsidiary-substantive flavours of different sanctioned by the usage of the author of orders? Why, again, would they revolt "The Faerie Queen." In touching those still more from a union of cold potato with very words Keats felt all the more deeply hot fish, or hot potato with cold fish? We the noble spirit of an age of poetry to which doubt if even Tiefdenken has yet completely we look back with pride and affection. exhausted the facts from which the induction ought to be made. He has leaped to the universal, before completely exhausting the particular. Greatly as we respect him, we doubt if his theory of the true relation of vegetables to meats in the palate-consciousness, will be sustained by subsequent inquirers. We doubt even if his own maturest views will completely bear out his present theories.

From The London Review.
JOHN KEATS.*

THE finest poetical instruction that Keats got was from Leigh Hunt, who tells us that no imaginative pleasure was left unnoticed by him and his friend, "from the recollection of the bards and patriots of old to the luxury of a summer rain at our windows or the clicking of the coal in winter time." Hunt was exactly the sort of a man to appreciate Keats. His own intense sympathies with material beauty of all kinds led him to understand the fervour with which

* The Life and Letters of John Keats. Houghton. A New Edition. One vol. Edward Moxon & Co.

By Lord
London:

When he employs them he does so with a manifest justice and appreciation, and with a full knowledge of their picturesque and suggestive power. He cannot be accused of conceit in following this manner, when we find he bears himself so evenly under the rich burdens with which he decorated his verses. A poet may use any language which he can use gracefully and effectually, and it is a cant of criticism to look up phrases for him, as though it were a fine thing, so to speak, to see him working for our pleasure with one hand tied.

A distinct characteristic of Keats' poetry consists in his ability for selecting epithets brilliant with light and colour. Of course no poet is a poet without this accomplishment; but in Keats it was specially remarkable. Take this line:

"Oh! what a power has white simplicity!" The reader has only to pause for a moment over the vivid image awakened by the word "white" here to see our meaning.. It personifies the idea of the line with a flash. Keats had in his mind the taste and feeling aided him in finding the expression he reof a painter as well as of a poet, and this quired to complete the tone and finish of

his verses.

That they were rugged or careless we cannot for a moment believe. They are not set to common airs, or steeped in atmospheres which artists have plenty of receipts for making, but they are polished to the mark of their own design, and their abruptness is only the chromatic discord and involution of an artist who hovers in a short uncertainty above the point on which he is about to settle. Keats did not write for Rosa Matilda, for Grub-street, or for the rule-of-thumb judges. Neither did he abandon himself to mysticism, although there were strong temptations in his way to do so. People talk currently of the difficulty of understanding him. There is no such difficulty. The smallest sensibility for the real thing in poetry should be capable of detecting the music and the vast reach and thrill of Keats' writing. To be sure, if minds are saturated with the drugged rhetoric of Byron, it is possible that they may be often deaf to Keats; but we hold that a man who can lay down "Hyperion," and not be stirred into admiration for it, is only fit to derive his enjoyment from verse from the penny readings of a mechanics' institute.

But he never forced himself. When he had finished his writing for the day he usually read it over to me, and then read or wrote letters until we went out for a walk. It was in this summer that he first visited Stratford-on-Avon, and added his name to the thousands inscribed on Shakespeare's walls."

Keats expressed rather strong views on the female question, and spoke bitterly of the women scribblers who, "having taken a snatch or luncheon of literary scraps, set themselves up for towers of Babel in languages, Sapphos in poetry, Euclids in geometry, and everything in nothing."

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It is pleasant to learn that Keats admired Wordsworth, and " was never tired of reading the 'Ode on Immortality."" The two writers were indeed widely apart in their modes of thinking and expressing themselves, yet it is not difficult to understand Keats' appreciation of the one poem at least in which Wordsworth seems to flush with a rare prophetic instinct. With reference to his personal habits, Keats was neither a dissipated nor an exceedingly temperate man. If anything, he enjoyed the world too much for his health. He possessed a nervous energy which gave him an appearance of strength; and, indeed, it was strength, for it enabled him to trounce a butcher whom he saw beating a small boy at Hampstead. But he was not organically sound. His lungs were diseased, and Coleridge says that when he first met him, "a loose, slack, not well-dressed youth," in a lane near Highgate, he remarked aside to Leigh Hunt, when he had shaken hands with Keats, There is death in that hand." We get a further description of Keats from Mrs. Bryan Procter, who met him at Hazlitt's lectures. This was before the delicacy of his constitution began to show itself. • His eyes were large, his hair auburn; he wore it divided down the centre, and it fell in rich masses on each side his face; his mouth was full and less intellectual than his other features. His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness it had an expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight. The shape of his face had the squareness of a man's, but more like some women's faces I have seen, it was so wide over the forehead, and so small at the chin. He seemed in perfect health, and with life to his task, which was about fifty lines a day, offering all things that were precious to him." We have remarked on Keats' pleaswith his paper before him, and apparently with as much ease as he wrote his letters. Indeed, ure in producing a melody in verse. he acted quite up to the principle he lays down, he did without regard for the strict rules of that if poetry comes not as naturally as the metre. Lord Houghton is of opinion that, leaves of a tree, it had better not come at all.' in compassing his project, he often thus diSometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but verted" attention from the beauty of the not often, and he would make it up another day. thoughts and the force of the imagery."

We have here a number of letters written by the poet to Haydon and others. There is nothing so forcible in them as the constant faith which he had in his mission to sing. "I find," he says, in one place, "I cannot exist without poetry, without eternal poetry; I began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan. Phad become all in a tremble from not having written anything of late; the sonnet over leaf did me good I slept the better last night for it; this morning, however, I am nearly as bad again." Here was a constitutional temperament determining towards verse as a relief. We find constant expressions of a similar tendency. Such a disposition unfortunately does not win its way in the world of money. Keats had duns frequently at his gate, and at times he bore up with the infliction with fortitude enough. He wrote with great ease and fluency. During a visit he made to a Mr. Baily at Oxford, the latter had an opportunity of noting his habits in this respect, of which he has left the following record:

"He wrote and I read-sometimes at the same table, sometimes at separate desks-from

breakfast till two or three o'clock. He sat down

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This

Yet we think he was successful enough to feel justified in making the experiment. The letters contained in the volume under notice are not, on the whole, comparable with those of men who were neither as great poets or as quick humorists as Keats. Poetry became him better than prose, and he moved easier in it. Indeed, occasionally he resumes his natural habit of expression in corresponding with his friends; and to one John Reynolds he sends some amusing epistles in rhyme. The following note is from Haydon. It is amusingly marked with his style :

"MY DEAR KEATS,

"I shall go mad! In a field at Stratfordupon-Avon, that belonged to Shakespeare, they have found a gold ring and seal, with the initials W. S. and a true lover's knot between. If this is not Shakespeare, who is it? A true lover's knot! I saw an impression to-day, and am to have one as soon as possible. As sure as you breathe, and that he was the first of beings, the seal belonged to him. O Lord!

"B. R. HAYDON."

fection and care of those who knew him and loved him.

Athough Keats was not a brilliant letterwriter, he possessed a certain humour and freedom of style which often rendered his correspondence sufficiently marked and characteristic. What spoiled his mind, however, for such light work was the fierce earnestness which lay underneath everything he wrote, and which he was altogether unable to control. The bubbles of fun upon the surface frequently indicated a hot and feverish nature below rather than a natural fresh spring of feeling. In fact, he was intensely and painfully self-conscious. He was constantly thinking of himself and what the world thought of him. Not only his heart was laid bare, but his very brain seemed uncovered to the attacks of critics; and he shrank from their blows like one of those men whose skulls have imperfectly knitted, and who wince with a morbid terror even at a threatening gesture. strove to disarm his enemies by confessing his fear of them—now by loud challenges, now by abject admissions of incapacity, mingled incongruously with desperate avowals of what he could do, and intended to "do. He had no philosophic balance of mind whatever. He was unable to contemplate either failure or success with patience. His sympathies, too, drifted in an ominous fashion towards the saddest tragedies in the history of literature. Endymion" was inscribed to the memory of Chatterton. In his introduction to the same work he writes: "This may be speaking too presumptuously and may deserve a punishment; but no

Keats took a more sensible view of this discovery than his enthusiastic correspondent, and hoped the seal was not "Brummagem.' In return for his news, however, he sends Haydon some verses, the first batch of which concludes

"Then who would go

Into dark Soho,

And chatter with dark-haired critics,

When he can stay

For the new-mown hay,

And startle the dappled crickets?

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He

There's a bit of doggerel; you would like a bit feeling man will be forward to inflict it; he

of botheral!

"Where be you going, you Devon maid?'
And what have you there in your basket?
Ye tight little fairy, just fresh from the dairy,
Will ye give me some cream if I ask it?

"I love your hills and I love your dales

And I love your flocks a-bleating; But, oh, on the heather to lie together, With both our hearts a-beating!

"I'll put your basket all safe in a nook,

Your shawl I'll hang on a willow; And we will sigh in the daisy's eye And kiss on a grass-green pillow."

Up to the time when Keats indulged in this sort of clever trifling, his mind appears buoyant and brisk enough. Indeed for a considerable period afterwards, he continued to correspond in a gay and cheerful mood: but at the close his life was dismal and clouded, though not uncheered by the af

will leave me alone with the conviction that there is not a fiercer hell than the failure of a great object." There are people who have admired the brutal epigram of Byron, referring to the supposed effect of a review upon Keats, and to them the above sentence will seem a proof that the epigram was true; but Keats did not die of a Quarterly. With all his sensitiveness, he had the sustaining pride of a man of genius; and, although the general reception of his work might tell upon him, he could not but despise, although he might have felt, the splenetic blackguardism which it was then the fashion to call literary opinions. It is impossible now to read with patience the coarse personalities of Wilson and his clique upon Leigh Hunt and his friends. In Blackwood appeared an article on Keats which has been seldom equalled for ignoble scurrility. The circumstance of his having been brought up a surgeon inspires the writer with the remark that " it is a better and a wiser thing to be

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marked, in connection with the ruffianly attack on Keats of which so much has been said, "I would not be the person who wrote that homicidal article for all the honour and glory in the world." We may dismiss this worn theme by noting the manner in which Shelley avenged his friend in a verse which must have made the writer of the article writhe.

Keats fell in love (your poet must have his grand passion), and a sad story his lovestory reads. Lord Houghton alludes with a becoming delicacy to the circumstances.

a starved apothecary than a starved poet; "Iment and will keep his name." and he is told " to go back to his gallipots." Jeffrey, however, had the taste to discover the value of the new poet, though he was not very prompt in his declaration of it; and his criticism on 66 Endymion," when it did come, was thickly sprinkled with those damnable qualifications which seem interposed between the work and the vision of the reviewer, especially for the purpose of exhibiting the power of the latter in corking down enthusiasm. Jeffrey could not fully appreciate Keats. He was in truth a fine, though a narrow judge. Poetry, according to him, was an art well furnished" Where personal feelings of so profound a with precedents. He had his rules and his character are concerned, it does not become statute laws on the subject. At the same the biographer in any case to do more than time, his yellow spectacles and his plumb indicate their effect on the life of his hero, line did not altogether cause him to miss and where the memoir so nearly approaches the beauties and the excellences of Keats. the times of its subject that the persons in He concludes one notice of "Endymion" question, or at any rate their near relations, in the following words, and the reader will may be still alive, it will at once be felt how observe the illiberal caution with which he indecorous would be any conjectural analyintroduces what would otherwise have been sis of such sentiments, or indeed any more a frank, as well as a sincere compliment:- intrinsic record of them than is absolutely "We are very much inclined to add that necessary for the comprehension of the real we do not know any book which we would man." We cannot, however, read Keats' sooner employ as a test to ascertain whether letters without a sensibility for the constant any one had in him a native relish for poetry quivering affection, fed by a fancy which and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic sought so far and wide for wherewithal to charm." We must however say for Jeffrey trick out the idealized woman. And it is that when he wrote he had not the assist- with some relief in the lasting beauty and ance in his judgment of that public feeling fitness of a pure love that we learn that the for concentrated poetry which is now com- poet did not give his heart into the keeping mon enough. In some respects his opinions of a fool. Keats's health as well as circumof Keats are marked by great shrewdness stances made the prospect of a union hopeand neatness of expression; but that is all. less. Lord Houghton, however, says of the He was mechanical and scholarly, but never lady of his choice It is enough that she sought to reveal Keats; he was content to has preserved his memory with a sacred interpret and translate him with skill. This honour, and it is no vain assumption that to is one function of criticism, but it is neither have aspired and sustained the one passion the first nor the most satisfactory. With of this noble being has been a source of reference to Byron, it can only be said that grave delight and earnest thankfulness as his opinion of Keats was contradictory, through the changes and chances of her it is valueless; but it may also be said that earthly pilgrimage." All early deaths of some of his expressions towards Keats men of promise read sadly, but there is should never have been printed by those something inexpressibly touching in the who would care to have his memory pro- death of Keats to those who enter into the tected from dislike. What are we to think spirit of his poetry. His whole mind was of the chivalrous "Childe Harold" writing surcharged with life-with the life of the to the editor of a review, "No more Keats, earth. He vibrated to the movements not I entreat; flay him alive- if some of you only of the world of people about him but don't, I must skin him myself. There is no to the material world, every flower of which bearing the drivelling idiotism of the mani- affected him, not with the borrowed pathos kin." Against this we can only put, for of association, but with a sort of personal Byron's sake, the following, addressed to kinship and regard. He never would set Mr. Murray:'You know very well that an oak the task of talking or thinking a I did not approve of Keats' poetry, or pretty love-idyll, but, in a far more proprinciples of poetry, or of his abuse of found sense, he would believe it to be conPope; but as he is dead, omit all that is stantly palpitating and brooding. The unisaid about him in any MSS. of mine or pub-verse to him was not contrived as a sort of lication. His Hyperion' is a fine monu- theological orrery in order to instruct peo

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