In the journal-letter of these weeks to his brother and sister-in-law, mentioning how he had been asked to join Woodhouse over a bottle of claret at his coffee-house, he breaks into a rhapsody over the virtues and wholesomeness of that beverage and adds 'this same claret is the only palate-passion I have--I forgot game--I must plead guilty to the breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the back-bone of a grouse, the wing and side of a Pheasant, and a Woodcock _passim_.' Turning to his own affairs, he says,-- I am in no despair about them--my poem has not at all succeeded; in the course of a year or so I think I shall try the public again--in a selfish point of view I should suffer my pride and my contempt of public opinion to hold me silent--but for yours and Fanny's sake I will pluck up a spirit and try again. I have no doubt of success in a course of years if I persevere--but it must be patience--for the Reviews have enervated and made indolent men's minds--few think for themselves. These Reviews are getting more and more powerful, especially the Quarterly--they are like a superstition which the more it prostrates the Crowd and the longer it continues the more powerful it becomes just in proportion to their increasing weakness. I was in hopes that when people saw, as they must do now, all the trickery and iniquity of these Plagues they would scout them, but no, they are like the spectators at the Westminster cock-pit--they like the battle--and do not care who wins or who loses. Among other matters he has a long story to tell about his friend Bailey's fickleness in love. It appears that Bailey, after a first unfortunate love-affair, had during the past year been paying his addresses to Mariane Reynolds, begging that she would take time to consider her answer, and that while her decision was still uncertain Bailey, to the great indignation of all the Reynolds family and a little to Keats's own, had engaged himself in Scotland to the sister of his friend Gleig, afterwards well known as author of _The Subaltern_ and Chaplain General to the Forces. Next Keats begins quoting with a natural zest of admiration, almost in full, that incomparable piece of studied and sustained invective, Hazlitt's _Letter to William Gifford Esqr._, beside which Gifford's own controversial virulences seem relatively blunt and boorish. Half way through Keats has to say he will copy the rest tomorrow,--