It knows itself to be a great dunce, and that it has no opinions but upon suggestion. Yet it is unwilling to appear in leading-strings, and would have it thought that its decisions are as wise as they are weighty. It is hasty in taking up its favourites, more hasty in laying them aside, lest it should be supposed deficient in sagacity in either case. It is generally divided into two strong parties, each of which will allow neither common sense nor common honesty to the other side. It reads the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and believes them both--or if there is a doubt, malice turns the scale. Taylor and Hessey told me that they had sold nearly two editions of the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays in about three months, but that after the Quarterly Review of them came out, they never sold another copy. The public, enlightened as they are, must have known the meaning of that attack as well as those who made it. It was not ignorance then but cowardice that led them to give up their own opinion. A crew of mischievous critics at Edinburgh having fixed the epithet of the _Cockney School_ to one or two writers born in the metropolis, all the people in London became afraid of looking into their works, lest they too should be convicted of cockneyism. Oh brave public! This epithet proved too much for one of the writers in question, and stuck like a barbed arrow in his heart. Poor Keats! What was sport to the town was death to him. Young, sensitive, delicate, he was like "A bud bit by an envious worm, Ere he could spread his sweet leaves to the air, Or dedicate his beauty to the sun"-- and unable to endure the miscreant cry and idiot laugh, withdrew to sigh his last breath in foreign climes.--The public is as envious and ungrateful as it is ignorant, stupid, and pigeon-livered-- "A huge-sized monster of ingratitudes."