Adonais is an elegy after _the manner of
Moschus_, on a foolish young man, who, after writing some volumes of
very weak, and, in the greater part, of very indecent poetry, died some
time since of a consumption: the breaking down of an infirm constitution
having, in all probability, been accelerated by the discarding his neck
cloth, a practice of the cockney poets, who look upon it as essential to
genius, inasmuch as neither Michael Angelo, Raphael or Tasso are
supposed to have worn those antispiritual incumbrances. In short, as the
vigour of Sampson lay in his hair, the secret of talent with these
persons lies in the neck; and what aspirations can be expected from a
mind enveloped in muslin. Keats caught cold in training for a genius,
and, after a lingering illness, died, to the great loss of the
Independents of South America, whom he had intended to visit with an
English epic poem, for the purpose of exciting them to liberty. But
death, even the death of the radically presumptuous profligate, is a
serious thing; and as we believe that Keats was made presumptuous
chiefly by the treacherous puffing of his cockney fellow gossips, and
profligate in his poems merely to make them saleable, we regret that he
did not live long enough to acquire common sense, and abjure the
pestilent and perfidious gang who betrayed his weakness to the grave,
and are now panegyrising his memory into contempt.
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