"Nor is it only obnoxious writers on politics themselves, but all their friends and acquaintances, and those whom they casually notice, that come under their sweeping anathema. It is proper to make a clear stage. The friends of Caesar must not be suspected of an amicable intercourse with patriotic and incendiary writers. A young poet comes forward; an early and favourable notice appears of some boyish verses of his in the _Examiner_, independently of all political opinion. That alone decides fate; and from that moment he is set upon, pulled in pieces, and hunted into his grave by the whole venal crew in full cry after him. It was crime enough that he dared to accept praise from so disreputable a quarter." In a letter from Hunt in Italy to _The Examiner_, July 7, 1822, an inquiry is made why Mr. Gifford has never noticed Keats's last volume: "that beautiful volume containing _Lamia_, the story from Boccaccio, and that magnificent fragment _Hyperion_?" _Blackwood's_ of August replied to these two defenses in a tirade of twenty-two pages against the _Edinburgh Review_, Hazlitt, and Hunt. The _Noctes Ambrosianae_ of October continued in the same strain and, though the grave should have protected Keats from such banter, revived the old allusions to the apothecary and his pills. In self defense against the charge, that its attacks and those of the _Quarterly_ had broken Keats's heart, _Blackwood's_ in January, 1826, said that it alone had dealt with Keats, Shelley and Procter with "_common sense_ or _common feeling_"; that, seeing Keats in the road to ruin with the Cockneys, it had "tried to save him by wholesome and severe discipline--they drove him to poverty, expatriation and death." The most remarkable part of this remarkable justification is this: "Keats outhunted Hunt in a species of emasculated pruriency, that, although invented in Little Britain, looks as if it were the prospect of some imaginative Eunuch's muse within the melancholy inspiration of the Haram" (_sic_). In March, 1828, in a review of _Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries_, the _Quarterly_ seized the opportunity to revert to the author's friendship for Keats in its old hostile manner; and, in a criticism of Coleridge's poems in August, 1834, to speak of his "dreamy, half-swooning style of verse criticised by Lord Byron (in language too strong for print) as the fatal sin of Mr. John Keats." Finally in March, 1840, in _Journalism in France_, there is another feeble effort at defense; a resentment of the "twaddle" against the _Quarterly_ "when they had the misfortune to criticise a sickly poet, who died soon afterwards, apparently for the express purpose of dishonoring us." One of Hunt's utterances in regard to Keats and his critics disposes finally of the matter: "his fame may now forgive the critics who disliked his politics, and did not understand his poetry."[515] * * * * *