"Keats appears to have been of opinion that I ought to have taken more notice of what the critics said against him. And perhaps I ought. My notices of them may not have been sufficient. I may have too much contented myself with panegyrizing his genius, and thinking the objections to it of no ultimate importance. Had he given me a hint to another effect, I should have acted upon it. But in truth, as I have before intimated, I did not see a twentieth part of what was said against us; nor had I the slightest notion, at that period, that he took criticism so much to heart. I was in the habit, though a public man, of living in a world of abstractions of my own; and I regarded him as of a nature still more abstracted, and sure of renown. Though I was a politician (so to speak), I had scarcely a political work in my library. Spensers and Arabian Tales filled up the shelves; and Spenser himself was not remoter, in my eyes, from all the common-places of life, than my new friend. Our whole talk was made up of idealisms. In the streets we were in the thick of the old woods. I little suspected, as I did afterwards, that the hunters had struck him; and never at any time did I suspect that he could have imagined it desired by his friends. Let me quit the subject of so afflicting a delusion."[513] The _Edinburgh Review_ of August, 1820, discussed _Endymion_ and the 1820 volume. While it lamented the extravagances and obscurities, the "intoxication of sweetness" and the perversion of rhyme, it gave Keats due credit for his genius and his appreciation of the spirit of poetry. Hunt's review of _Lamia_[514] and the other poems of the 1820 volume appeared in _The Indicator_ of the same month. _Blackwood's_ answered the next month, abusing Hunt roundly and faintly praising the poems. The following proves that their chief object was to strike Hunt through Keats: "It is a pity that this young man, John Keats, author of _Endymion_, and some other poems, should have belonged to the Cockney School--for he is evidently possessed of talents that, under better direction, might have done very considerable things. As it is, he bids fair to sink himself beneath such a mass of affectation, conceit, and Cockney pedantry, as I never expected to see heaped together by anybody, except the first founder of the School.... There is much merit in some of the stanzas of Mr. Keats's last volume, which I have just seen; no doubt he is a fine feeling lad--and I hope he will live to despise Leigh Hunt and be a poet." Hazlitt, in May of the next year wrote of the persecution of Keats in the _Edinburgh Review_: