The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎51v] (107/244)

592
THE NINETEENTH
April
Such, was the Blackwood article on Keats in August, 1818. It
had. the priority of the Quarterly article by a whole month, or more
nearly two months, and was a much heavier and more cruel blow. It
is probable indeed that the writer The lowest of the four classes into which East India Company civil servants were divided. A Writer’s duties originally consisted mostly of copying documents and book-keeping. of the article had read
the Blackwood article, and merely followed suit. And so, as I may
repeat, if Keats was capable of being killed by an unfavourable
review, he ought to have been dead or dying already before Gifford
lifted his clumsy club against him in the At the utmost
Gifford can have been but the ' Second Murderer' in the tragedy,
the part of the ' First Murderer ' having fallen to the truculent ' Z '
of Blackwood's Magazine. Who was this truculent ' Z ' ? Neither
has that secret been ever divulged authoritatively; but the natural
guess has been that he was either John Wilson, afterwards famous as-
t Christopher North,' or John Gibson Lockhart, afterwards the son-in-
law and biographer of Scott. Blackwood in those days had no recognised
editor, the supreme management being kept by the publisher in hi&
own hands ; but Wilson and Lockhart were his two officers-in-chief,
the founders of the fame of the magazine, and the contributors,
separately or conjointly, of most of those articles of flame and vitriol
that spread its early terrors. All the probabilities are that it was
Lockhart, the younger of the two—Keats's senior, in fact, but by one
year—that wrote the Keats article ; and, if so, it is somewhat curious-
that, of the two attacks of 1818 on Keats, one should have been
fathered by Gifford, then editor of the and the other andl
earlier should have been written by the man who was to succeed
Gifford in the editorship of the same
While the Shelley-and-Byron legend as to the cause of the death
of Keats thus breaks down in its original form, may it not, however,
be retained in a modified form ? May it not be true that, though
the Quarterly article was not responsible singly for the death of
Keats, that disaster was caused by the effects upon him of the two
nearly simultaneous articles of abuse and contempt—the
article stunning him first, and the article completing the
shock ? Let us see whether the facts of the case are consistent with
that modified hypothesis.
In April, 1818, Endymion was published, Keats was twenty-
two years and six months old. ' A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth/
was Coleridge's curt recollection of him from one casual encounter ; but
the accounts that have been left of him by those who knew him in
timately, and cherished his memory most fondly after he was gone,
are more precise and enthusiastic. Of small stature, but well-built,,
with an expression of frank courage and eager power in the face,
large and lustrous eyes, and hair of a golden brown, he was, they
unanimously tell us, one of the most impressive and loveable young
fellows ever seen,—manly and generous, affectionate and kindly.