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]
"I most devoutly wish I were living near London.... My inclination points to Hampstead; but I do not know whether I should not make up my mind to something more completely suburban. What are mountains, trees, heaths, or even glorious and ever beautiful sky, with such sunsets as I have seen at Hampstead, to friends? Social enjoyment, in some form or other, is the Alpha and the Omega of existence. All that I see in Italy--and from my tower window I now see the magnificent peaks of the Apennine half enclosing the plain--is nothing. It dwindles into smoke in the mind, when I think of some familiar forms of scenery, little perhaps in themselves, over which old remembrances have thrown a delightful colour."[516]