From finishing _Endymion_ at Burford Bridge Keats returned some time before mid-December to his Hampstead lodging. The exact date is uncertain; but it was in time to see Kean play _Richard III_ at Drury Lane on the 15th--the actor's first performance after a break of some weeks due to illness. J. H. Reynolds had gone to Exeter for a Christmas holiday, and Keats, acting as his substitute, wrote four dramatic criticisms for the _Champion_: the first, printed on December 21, on Kean in general and his re-appearance as Richard III in particular; a second on a hash of the three parts of Shakespeare's _Henry VI_ produced under the title _Richard Duke of York_, with Kean in the name-part and probably Kean also as compiler; a third on a tragedy of small account by one Dillon, called _Retribution_, or the _Chieftain's Daughter_, in which the young Macready played the part of the villain; and a fourth on a pantomime of _Don Giovanni_. No one, least of all one living in Keats's circle, could well attempt stage criticism at this time without trying to write like Hazlitt. Keats acquits himself on the whole rather youthfully and crudely. In one point he is cruder than one would have expected, and that is where, after re-reading the three parts of _Henry VI_ for his purpose, he retracts what he had begun to say about them and declares that they are 'perfect works,' apparently without any suspicion that Shakespeare's part in them is at most that of a beginner of genius touching up the hackwork of others with a fine passage here and there. It is only in the notice of Kean as Richard III that the genius in Keats really kindles. Here his imagination teaches him phrases beyond the reach of Hazlitt, to express (there is nothing more difficult) the specific quality and very thrill of the actor's voice and utterance. The whole passage is of special interest, both what is groping in it and what is masterly, and alike for itself and for such points as its familiar use of tags from the then recent _Christabel_ and _Siege of Corinth_:--