There is a lesson in these things. I remember the late Mr Andrew Lang, one of the most variously gifted and richly equipped critical minds of our time, and under a surface vein of flippancy essentially kind-hearted,--I remember Mr Andrew Lang, in a candid mood of conversation, wondering whether in like circumstances he might not have himself committed a like offence, and with no _Hyperion_ or _St Agnes' Eve_ or _Odes_ yet written and only the 1817 volume and _Endymion_ before him, have dismissed Keats fastidiously and scoffingly. Who knows?--and let us all take warning. But now-a-days the errors of criticism are perhaps rather of an opposite kind, and any rashness and rawness of undisciplined novelty is apt to find itself indulged and fostered rather than repressed. What should at any time have saved _Endymion_ from harsh judgment, if the quality of the poetry could not save it, was the quality of the preface. How could either carelessness or rancour not recognize, not augur the best from, its fine spirit of manliness and modesty and self-knowledge? The responsibility for the gallipots article, as for so many others in the Blackwood of the time, may have been in some sort collective. But that Lockhart had the chief share in it is certain. According to Dilke, he in later life owned as much. To those who know his hand, he stands confessed not only in the general gist and style but in particular phrases. One is the use of Sangrado for doctor, a use which both Scott and Lockhart had caught from _Gil Blas_.[2] Others are the allusions to the _Metromanie_ of Piron and the _Endymion_ of Wieland, particularly the latter. Wieland's _Oberon_, as we have seen, had made its mark in England through Sotheby's translation, but no other member of the Blackwood group is the least likely to have had any acquaintance with his untranslated minor works except Lockhart, whose stay at Weimar had given him a familiar knowledge of contemporary German literature. In the _Mad Banker of Amsterdam_, a comic poem in the vein of Frere's _Whistlecraft_ and Byron's _Beppo_, contributed by him at this time to Blackwood under one of his Protean pseudonyms, as 'William Wastle Esq.,' Lockhart sketches his own likeness as follows:-- Then touched I off friend Lockhart (Gibson John), So fond of jabbering about Tieck and Schlegel, Klopstock and _Wieland_, Kant and Mendelssohn, All High Dutch quacks, like Spurzheim or Feinagle-- Him the Chaldee yclept the Scorpion.-- The claws, but not the pinions, of the eagle, Are Jack's, but though I do not mean to flatter, Undoubtedly he has strong powers of satire.