CONTENTS OF THE APPENDIX. I. Review by Leigh Hunt of Lamia, Isabella &c. II. Later Remarks on Keats by Leigh Hunt. III. Boccaccio's Story of Isabella, in English by John Payne. IV. The "sad ditty" born of the Story of Isabella. V. Extract from Clarke's Riches of Chaucer as to the composition of the Sonnet on The Floure and the Lefe. VI. John Hamilton Reynolds's "Robin Hood Sonnets". VII. Letter from Benjamin Robert Haydon concerning the Son- VIII. Sonnets from Leigh Hunt's Foliage-Milton's Hair. I. THE STORIES OF LAMIA, THE POT OF BASIL, THE EVE OF ST. AGNES, &c., AS TOLD BY MR. KEATS. A REVIEW BY LEIGH HUNT published in The Indicator for the 2nd and 9th of August 1820. IN laying before our readers an account of another new publication, it is fortunate that the nature of the work again falls in with the character of our miscellany; part of the object of which is to relate the stories of old times. We shall therefore abridge into prose the stories which Mr. Keats has told in poetry, only making up for it, as we go, by cutting some of the richest passages out of his verse, and fitting them in to our plainer narrative. They are such as would leaven a much greater lump. Their drops are rich and vital, the essence of a heap of fertile thoughts. The first story, entitled Lamia, was suggested to our author by a passage in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, which he has extracted at the end of it. We will extract it here, at the beginning, that the readers may see how he has enriched it. Burton's relation is itself an improvement on the account in Philostratus. The old After his second paragraph Hunt extracts the quotation from Burton given at page 40 of the present volume. book-fighter with melancholy thoughts is speaking of the seductions of phantasmata. According to our poet, Mercury had come down from heaven, one day, in order to make love to a nymph, famous for her beauty. He could not find her; and he was halting among the woods uneasily, when he heard a lonely voice, complaining. It was A mournful voice, Such as once heard, in gentle heart, destroys "And love, and pleasure, and the ruddy strife Mercury went looking about among the trees and grass, Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake. The admiration, pity, and horror, to be excited by humanity in a brute shape, were never perhaps called upon by a greater mixture of beauty and deformity than in the picture of this creature. Our pity and suspicions are begged by the first word: the profuse and vital beauties with which she is covered seem proportioned to her misery and natural rights; and lest we should lose sight of them in this gorgeousness, the "woman's mouth" fills us at once with shuddering and compassion. She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Vermillion-spotted, golden, green, and blue ; &c.1 The serpent tells Mercury that she knows upon what quest he is bound, and asks him if he has succeeded. The god, with the usual eagerness of his species to have 1 Hunt continues his quotation down to the end of line 63 (see page 13). |