Note 46 — ESSAYS ON THE ACTED DRAMA IN LONDON CONTRIBUTED TO THE LONDON MAGAZINE (1820) (continued 3)

‘Or mouth with slumbery pout.’ Keats’s Endymion.

The phrase might be applied to Miss Stephens: though it is a vile phrase, worse than Hamlet’s ‘beautified’ applied to Ophelia. Indeed it has been remarked that Mr. Keats resembles Shakspeare in the novelty and eccentricity of his combinations of style. If so, it is the only thing in which he is like Shakspeare: and yet Mr. Keats, whose misfortune and crime it is, like Milton, to have been born in London, is a much better poet than Mr. Wilson, or his Patroclus Mr. Lockart; nay, further, if Sir Walter Scott (the sly Ulysses of the Auld Reekie school,) had written many of the passages in Mr. Keats’s poems, they would have been quoted as the most beautiful in his works. We do not here (on the banks of the Thames) damn the Scotch novels in the lump, because the writer is a Sawney Scot. But the sweet Edinburgh wits damn Mr. Keats’s lines in the lump, because he is born in London. ‘Oh Scotland, judge of England, what a treasure hast thou in one fair son, and one fair son-in-law, neither of whom (by all accounts) thou lovest passing well!’