[6] Printed in error 'Glenside' in all the editions: but the MS. is quite clear, and even were it not so topography would require Glencroe.
[7] See John Campbell of Islay, _Popular Tales of the West Highlands_ (1860), vol. ii, p. 52. I owe the suggestion and the reference to my friend Prof. W. P. Ker. Personally I have always associated the magic casements with the Enchanted Castle of Claude's picture representing a very different scene. But the poet's mind is a crucible made for extracting from ingredients no matter how heterogeneous the quintessence, the elixir, which it needs.
SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 1818: _BLACKWOOD_ AND THE _QUARTERLY_
_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_--Partisan excesses--Wild inconsistency--Virulences of first number--The 'Z' papers and Leigh Hunt--Blackwood and Walter Scott--_The Chaldee Manuscript_--Scott's warning to Lockhart--Lockhart and Keats--'Z' on _Endymion_--A lesson to critics--Marks of Lockhart's hand--The Quarterly on _Endymion_--Indignant friends: Bailey--Reynolds--Woodhouse and Taylor--Keats's composure under attack--Subsequent effects--Tom Keats _in extremis_--Three months by the sick-bed--First Journal-letter to America--Dread of love and marriage--Death of Tom Keats.
On the first of September, within a fortnight of Keats's return from the North, appeared the threatened attack on him in Blackwood's _Edinburgh Magazine_. Much as has been said and written on the history and effect of the 'Cockney School' articles, my task requires that the story should be retold, as accurately and fairly as may be, in the light of our present knowledge.
The Whig party in politics and letters had held full ascendency for half a generation in the periodical literature of Scotland by means of the _Edinburgh Review_, published by Archibald Constable and edited at this time by Jeffrey. The Tory rival, the _Quarterly_, was owned and published also by a Scotsman, but a Scotsman migrated to London, John Murray. Early in 1817 William Blackwood, an able Tory bookseller in Edinburgh, projected a new monthly review which should be a thorn in the side of his astute and ambitious trade rival, Constable, and at the same time should hold up the party flag against the blue and yellow Whig colours in the North, and show a livelier and lustier fighting temper than the Quarterly. The first number appeared in March under the title of _The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine_. The first editors were two insignificant men who proved neither competent nor loyal, and flat failure threatening the enterprise, Blackwood after six months got rid of the editors and determined to make a fresh start. He added his own name to the title of the magazine and called to his aid two brilliant young men who had been occasional contributors, John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, both sound Oxford scholars and Lockhart moreover a well-read modern linguist, both penmen of extraordinary facility and power of work, both at this period of their lives given, in a spirit partly of furious partisanship partly of reckless frolic, to a degree of licence in controversy and satire inconceivable to-day. Wilson, by birth the son of a rich Glasgow manufacturer but now reduced in fortune, was in person a magnificent, florid, blue-eyed athlete of thirty, and in literature the bully and Berserker of the pair. Lockhart, the scion of an ancient Lanarkshire house, a dark, proud, handsome and graceful youth of twenty-three, pensive and sardonically reserved, had a deadly gift of satire and caricature and a lust for exercising it which was for a time uncontrollable like a disease. Wilson had lived on Windermere in the intimacy of Wordsworth and his circle, and already made a certain mark in literature with his poem _The Isle of Palms_. Lockhart had made a few firm friends at Oxford and after his degree had frequented the Goethe circle at Weimar, but was otherwise without social or literary experience. Blackwood was the eager employer and unflinching backer of both. The trio were determined to push the magazine into notoriety by fair means or foul. Its management was informally divided between them, so that no one person could be held responsible. Of Wilson and Lockhart, each was at one time supposed to be editor, but neither ever admitted as much or received separate payment for editorial work. They were really chief contributors and trusted and insistent chief advisers, but Blackwood never let go his own control, and took upon himself, now with effrontery, now with evasion, occasionally with compromise made and satisfaction given, all the risks and rancours which the threefold management chose to incur.