dant qualities, which unfit them for purely and French beans, he deprecates the Conauxiliary and subsidary flavours. Take the tinental fashion of sending them round potato. Undoubtedly tedly it has not positive- solemnly as substantive dishes, -as if deness (positivität) enough for isolated con- serving, and, indeed, demanding a separate sumption. Even when mashed and reduced individual state of consciousness for the apby complete attrition and the agency of preciation of them, and lays it down that butter and milk to that sublimated form in both cauliflower and French beans are really which potatoes are handed round by some of that subsidiary class of foods which are Continental cooks for separate eating, no one can deny that there is a certain neutrality of flavour which is almost as unsatisfactory as, to a truly artistic eye, a drabcoloured dress. But yet there is almost as much to be said against the practice of using potatoes as mere auxiliaries to meat. It is true that they bave auxiliary flavours, of the same order as bread, which serve as a very good foil to the more positive qualities of beef or mutton, - that is not disputed; but then they have so much beyond this, so much that merely repeats the foody and, so to say, heavy, prosaic, dead-labour char too deficient in positiveness of flavour for self-sufficiency (Selbstständigkeit). On the other hand, he approves in the most emphatic manner of the universal combination of salad with chicken which characterizes the Continental cuisine,-both of France and of Germany. Every stranger on the Continent has noticed that salad and chicken go as invariably together, as horse-radish and beef in England. The present writer has often been puzzled by this phenomenon, for which there seems to be less obvious cause than for the grouping of the hot and biting flavour of horse-radish in the same acter of meat, instead of supplementing and unit of flavour, - the same state of " palatecompleting it. What you want in a true consciousness" Gaumen-Bewusstseyn) as the auxiliary flavour to the meat is not so much what will shade off and graduate the otherwise too positive and dominant taste of the animal fibre into faint vegetable flavours, as something, like the white margin of a picture, that will set it off by contrast, and relieve it by giving the sense of ample space and room. Now it is only a very small part of the flavour of potato of which this can be truly said: -there is much redundant flavour which is nothing but a reiteration of the uphill work of real eating. Hence the difficulty, - what to do with potato, which is on the border line between an auxiliary and a substantive food? Undoubtedly the true solution is likely to be found in the direction of combining it with etherealized essences of meat stripped of their fibrine, appetite-satisfying character, German Professor accurately, 7. if somewhat pedantically, calls it, with the rich and yet tenacious fibre of roast beef. One can understand why a keen and biting heat like that of horse-radish is specially suitable to the richness and tenacity of beef, though it would not be at all equally suitable to the richness of pork, which melts away, as it were, and becomes evanescent, offering too little resistance to so dominant an auxiliary flavour as that of horse-radish. But we never saw equally clearly, till we read the great German's treatise, why the traditional association of roast chicken and salad which prevails on the Continent has satisfied so completely the demands of the most highly educated palates of our century. Englishmen usually associate salad with cold roast beef, a dish unknown abroad in any sense but the perfect solution has not been reached. in which an Englishman understands the Tiefdenken thinks he sees more scientific term, and we still lean to the national insight in the bias of the Continent, - and prejudice. Tiefdenken defends his view, also, as he reminds us, of the Irish Celts, however, thus:he subdivides flavours in this, as in so many other things, show- into those which may be called (1) abso ing their kinship with the French as distinguished from the heavy Saxon genius, for treating it as a substantive food, than in the heavy and rather carnal English fashion of allowing it to reduplicate and thicken by its redundant fibre, the natural stoggi lutely subsidiary and incapable of substantive existence, like condiments and faint vegetables; (2) substantive-subsidiary, like most of the stronger green vegetables (spinach, for instance), i.e., those which though, on the whole, subsidiary, are on the verge ness of meat. The preference of the Con- of substantive flavours; and (3) subsidiarytinental cooks for serving pototoes, when substantive, like potatoes, salad, and a few they use them as an auxiliary and subsidiary of the fainter species of white meats, such dish at all, chiefly with the lighter textures, as chicken, which, though on the whole subsuch as fish, rather than with the heavy stantive, and capable of occupying, though textures of beef, mutton, and veal, is there- not perfectly, a complete state of palatefore carnestly justified by Tiefdenken. On consciousness, yet have so many lacunæ of the other hand, in the case of cauliflower flavour in them as to be capable also of still roundings in which he was born. more perfect use in combination with other Keats strove so constantly to kindle a fire complementary flavours. Now he lays it of passion around everything that he saw or down as a great canon that though the sub- thought of. Through Hunt he became acstantive-subsidiary flavours always need quainted with Hazlitt, Shelley, Haydon, combination with a flavour more substan- and Godwin, and the encouragement of such tive, and can never be reinforced by each companionship did much to prompt him to other,- spinach, for instance, not being efforts which he might have hesitated to capable of any combination with artichoke make had he remained amongst the suror any other flavour of the substantive-subsidiary class, so as to form a complete state of palate-consciousness, - the subsidiarysubstantive flavours, if of different orders, like a white meat and a vegetable, will coa- piminy criticism not altogether worthy of lesce perfectly into a single state of palate- his subject. A great deal too much has consciousness, and this the more, if the dif- been already said upon what is termed the ference of order be so great that the white slovenliness and incompleteness of what meat is best eaten hot, and the vegetable cold, or vice versa. The author of the book before us, while approaching his task in a reverent spirit enough, appears to indulge in a niminy Keats has left us. Lord Houghton even says "he did not escape the charge of sacrificing beauty to supposed intensity, and of merging the abiding grace of his song in the passionate phantasies of the moment." We prefer the "passionate phantasies" to the "abiding grace "(whatever it means,) and simply because Keats himself did best in following his own drift. Nor do we believe it to be true, as Lord Houghton again insists, that he was the worse for his love of Spenser and his introduction of phrases sanctioned by the usage of the author of "The Faerie Queen." In touching those Grant Tiefdenken's theory, and his explanation is really admirable. But, after all, we must remember that his theory is as yet only the induction of a profound and acute mind from a great number of facts presented to a sensitive and highly educated palateconsciousness. Why, if Tiefdenken's theory is true, do the most cultivated palates of England revolt from potato with fish,which is precisely a case of the union of two subsidiary-substantive flavours of different orders? Why, again, would they revolt still more from a union of cold potato with very words Keats felt all the more deeply hot fish, or hot potato with cold fish? We the noble spirit of an age of poetry to which doubt if even Tiefdenken has yet completely exhausted the facts from which the induction ought to be made. He has leaped to the universal, before completely exhausting the particular. Greatly as we respect him, we doubt if his theory of the true relation of vegetables to meats in the palate-consciousness, will be sustained by subsequent inquirers. We doubt even if his own maturest views will completely bear out his present theories. From The London Review. JOHN KEATS.* THE finest poetical instruction that Keats got was from Leigh Hunt, who tells us that no imaginative pleasure was left unnoticed by him and his friend, "from the recollection of the bards and patriots of old to the luxury of a summer rain at our windows or the clicking of the coal in winter time." Hunt was exactly the sort of a man to appreciate Keats. His own intense sympathies with material beauty of all kinds led him to understand the fervour with which *The Life and Letters of John Keats. By Lord Houghton. A New Edition. One vol. London: a we look back with pride and affection. When he employs them he does so with manifest justice and appreciation, and with a full knowledge of their picturesque and suggestive power. He cannot be accused of conceit in following this manner, when we find he bears himself so evenly under the rich burdens with which he decorated his verses. A poet may use any language which he can use gracefully and effectually, and it is a cant of criticism to look up phrases for him, as though it were a fine thing, so to speak, to see him working for our pleasure with one hand tied. A distinct characteristic of Keats' poetry consists in his ability for selecting epithets brilliant with light and colour. Of course no poet is a poet without this accomplishment; but in Keats it was specially remarkable. Take this line : "Oh! what a power has white simplicity!" The reader has only to pause for a moment over the vivid image awakened by the word "white" here to see our meaning.. It personifies the idea of the line with a flash. Keats had in his mind the taste and feeling of a painter as well as of a poet, and this aided him in finding the expression he required to complete the tone and finish of his verses. That they were rugged or care- | But he never forced himself. When he had finless we cannot for a moment believe. They ished his writing for the day he usually read it are not set to common airs, or steeped in over to me, and then read or wrote letters until atmospheres which artists have plenty of receipts for making, but they are polished to the mark of their own design, and their abruptness is only the chromatic discord and we went out for a walk. It was in this summer that he first visited Stratford-on-Avon, and Shakespeare's walls." added his name to the thousands inscribed on involution of an artist who hovers in a short Keats expressed rather strong views on the uncertainty above the point on which he is about to settle. Keats did not write for Rosa Matilda, for Grub-street, or for the rule-of-thumb judges. Neither did he abandon himself to my mysticism, alt although there were strong temptations in his way to do so. People talk currently of the difficulty of understanding him. There is no such difficulty. The smallest sensibility for the real thing in poetry should be capable of detecting the music and the vast reach and thrill of Keats writing. To be sure, if minds are saturated with the drugged rhetoric of Byron, it is possible that they may be often deaf to Keats; but we hold that a man who can lay down "Hyperion," and not be stirred into admiration for it, is only fit to derive his enjoyment from verse from the penny readings of a mechanics' institute. female question, and spoke bitterly of the women scribblers who, "having taken a snatch or luncheon of literary scraps, set themselves up for towers of Babel in languages, Sapphos in poetry, Euclids in geometry, and everything in nothing." It is pleasant to learn that Keats admired Wordsworth, and "was never tired of reading the 'Ode on Immortality." The two writers were indeed widely apart in their modes of thinking and expressing themselves, yet it is not difficult to understand Keats' appreciation of the one poem at least in which Wordsworth seems to flush with a rare prophetic instinct. With reference to his personal habits, Keats was neither a dissipated nor an exceedingly temperate man. If anything, he enjoyed the world too much for his health. He possessed a nervous energy which gave him an appearance of strength; We have here a number of letters written by the poet to Haydon and others. There and, indeed, it was strength, for it enabled is nothing so forcible in them as the con-him to trounce a butcher whom he saw beatstant faith which he had in his mission to ing a small boy at Hampstead. But he was sing. "I find," he says, in one place, "I not organically sound. His lungs were dis cannot exist without poetry, without eternal poetry; I began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan. Phad become all in a tremble from not having written anything of late; the sonnet over leaf did me good -I slept the better last night for it; this morning, however, I am nearly as bad again." Here was a constitutional temperament determining towards verse as a relief. We find constant expressions of a similar tendency. Such a disposition unfortunately does not win its way in the world of money. Keats had duns frequently at his gate, and at times he bore up with the infliction with fortitude enough. He wrote with great ease and fluency. During a visit he made to a Mr. Baily at Oxford, the latter had an opportunity of noting his habits in this respect, of which he has left the following record: "He wrote and I read - sometimes at the same table, sometimes at separate desks-from breakfast till two or three o'clock. He sat down to his task, which was about fifty lines a day, with his paper before him, and apparently with as much ease as he wrote his letters. Indeed, he acted quite up to the principle he lays down, that if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves of a tree, it had better not come at all. Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not often, and he would make it up another day. eased, and Coleridge says that when he first met him, "a loose, slack, not well-dressed youth," in a lane near Highgate, he remarked aside to Leigh Hunt, when he had shaken hands with Keats, "There is death in that hand." We get a further description of Keats from Mrs. Bryan Procter, who met him at Hazlitt's lectures. This was before the delicacy of his constitution began to show itself. "His eyes were large, his hair auburn; he wore it divided down the centre, and it fell in rich masses on each side his face; his mouth was full and less intellectual than his other features. His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness - it had an expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight. The shape of his face had the squareness of a man's, but more like some women's faces I have seen, it was so wide over the forehead, and so small at the chin. He seemed in perfect health, and with life offering all things that were precious to him." We have remarked on Keats' pleasure in producing a melody in verse. This he did without regard for the strict rules of metre. Lord Houghton is of opinion that, in compassing his project, he often thus diverted "attention from the beauty of the thoughts and the force of the imagery." Yet we think he was successful enough to | fection and care of those who knew him and feel justified in making the experiment. loved him. The letters contained in the volume under Athough Keats was not a brilliant letternotice are not, on the whole, comparable writer, he possessed a certain humour and with those of men who were neither as great freedom of style which often rendered his poets or as quick humorists as Keats. Po-correspondence sufficiently marked and etry became him better than prose, and he characteristic. What spoiled his mind, moved easier in it. Indeed, occasionally he however, for such light work was the fierce resumes his natural habit of expression in corresponding with his friends; and to one John Reynolds he sends some e amusing epistles in rhyme. The following note is from Haydon. It is amusingly marked with his style : "MY DEAR KEATS, "I shall go mad! In a field at Stratfordupon-Avon, that belonged to Shakespeare, they have found a gold ring and seal, with the ini tials W. S. and a true lover's knot between. If this is not Shakespeare, who is it? A true lover's knot! I saw an impression to-day, and am to have'one as soon as possible. As sure as you breathe, and that he was the first of beings, the seal belonged to him. O Lord! "B. R. HAYDON." Keats took a more sensible view of this discovery than his enthusiastic correspondent, and hoped the seal was not "Brummagem." In return for his news, however, he sends Haydon some verses, the first batch of which concludes "Then who would go And chatter with dark-haired critics, When he can stay And startle the dappled crickets? earnestness which lay underneath everything he wrote, and which he was altogether unable to control. The bubbles of fun upon the surface frequently indicated a hot and feverish nature below rather than a natural fresh spring of feeling. In fact, he was intensely and painfully self-conscious. He was constantly thinking of himself and what the world thought of him. Not only his heart was laid bare, but his very brain seemed uncovered to the attacks of critics; and he shrank from their blows like one of those men whose skulls have imperfectly knitted, and who wince with a morbid terror even at a threatening gesture. He strove to disarm his enemies by confessing his fear of them - now by loud challenges, now by abject admissions of incapacity, mingled incongruously with desperate avowals of what he could do, and intended to do. He had no philosophic balance of mind whatever. He was unable to contemplate either failure or success with patience. His sympathies, too, drifted in an ominous fashion towards the saddest tragedies in the history of literature. "Endymion" was inscribed to the memory of Chatterton. In his introduction to the same work he writes: "This may be speaking too presumptuously and may deserve a punishment; but no There's a bit of doggerel; you would like a bit feeling man will be forward to inflict it; he of botheral! "Where be you going, you Devon maid?' And what have you there in your basket? "I love your hills and I love your dales "I'll put your basket all safe in a nook, Up to the time when Keats indulged in this sort of clever trifling, his mind appears buoyant and brisk enough. Indeed for a considerable period afterwards, he continued to correspond in a gay and cheerful mood: but at the close his life was dismal and clouded, though not uncheered by the af will leave me alone with the conviction that there is not a fiercer hell than the failure of a great object." There are people who have admired the brutal epigram of Byron, referring to the supposed effect of a review upon Keats, and to them the above sentence will seem a proof that the epigram was true; but Keats did not die of a Quarterly. With all his sensitiveness, he had the sustaining pride of a man of genius; and, although the general reception of his work might tell upon him, he could not but despise, although he might have felt, the splenetic blackguardism which it was then the fashion to call literary opinions. It is impossible now to read with patience the coarse personalities of Wilson and his clique upon Leigh Hunt and his friends. In Blackwood appeared an article on Keats which has been seldom equalled for ignoble scurrility. The circumstance of his having been brought up a surgeon inspires the writer with the remark that " it is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; and he is told " to go back to his gallipots." Jeffrey, however, had the taste to discover the value of the new poet, though he was not very prompt in his declaration of it; and his criticism on Endymion," when it did come, was thickly sprinkled with those damnable qualifications which seem interposed between the work and the vision of the reviewer, especially for the purpose of exhibiting the power of the latter in corking down enthusiasm. Jeffrey could not fully appreciate Keats. He was in truth a fine, though a narrow judge. Poetry, according to him, was an art well furnished with precedents. He had his rules and his statute laws on the subject. At the same time, his yellow spectacles and his plumb line did not altogether cause him to miss the beauties and the excellences of Keats. He concludes one notice of "Endymion" in the following words, and the reader will observe the illiberal caution with which he introduces what would otherwise have been a frank, as well as a sincere compliment: "We are very much inclined to add that ment and will keep his name." He also remarked, in connection with the ruffianly attack on Keats of which so much has been said, "I would not be the person who wrote that homicidal article for all the honour and glory in the world." We may dismiss this worn theme by noting the manner in which Shelley avenged his friend in a verse which must have made the writer of the article writhe. Keats fell in love (your poet must have his grand passion), and a sad story his lovestory reads. Lord Houghton alludes with a becoming delicacy to the circumstances. "Where personal feelings of so profound a character are concerned, it does not become the biographer in any case to do more than indicate their effect on the life of his hero, and where the memoir so nearly approaches the times of its subject that the persons in question, or at any rate their near relations, may be still alive, it will at once be felt how indecorous would be any conjectural analysis of such sentiments, or indeed any more intrinsic record of them than is absolutely necessary for the comprehension of the real we do not know any book which we would man." We cannot, however, read Keats' sooner employ as a test to ascertain whether letters without a sensibility for the constant any one had in him a native relish for poetry quivering affection, fed by a fancy which and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic sought so far and wide for wherewithal to charm." We must however say for Jeffrey trick out the idealized woman. And it is that when he wrote he had not the assist- with some relief in the lasting beauty and ance in his judgment of that public feeling fitness of a pure love that we learn that the for concentrated poetry which is now com- poet did not give his heart into the keeping mon enough. In some respects his opinions of a fool. Keats's health as well as circum of Keats are marked by great shrewdness and neatness of expression; but that is all. He was mechanical and scholarly, but never sought to reveal Keats; he was content to interpret and translate him with skill. This is one function of criticism, but it is neither the first nor the most satisfactory. With reference to Byron, it can only be said that as his opinion of Keats was contradictory, it is valueless; but it may also be said that some of his expressions towards Keats should never have been printed by those who would care to have his memory protected from dislike. What are we to think of the chivalrous "Childe Harold" writing to the editor of a review, "No more Keats, I entreat; flay him alive - if some of you don't, I must skin him myself. There is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the manikin." Against this we can only put, for Byron's sake, the following, addressed to Mr. Murray:- "You know very well that I did not approve of Keats' poetry, or principles of poetry, or of his abuse of Pope: but as he is dead, omit all that is said about him in any MSS. of mine or publication. His Hyperion' is a fine monu stances made the prospect of a union hopeless. Lord Houghton, however, says of the lady of his choice - " It is enough that she has preserved his memory with a sacred honour, and it is no vain assumption that to have aspired and sustained the one passion of this noble being has been a source of grave delight and earnest thankfulness through the changes and chances of her earthly pilgrimage." All early deaths of men of promise read sadly, but there is something inexpressibly touching in the death of Keats to those who enter into the spirit of his poetry. His whole mind was surcharged with life - with the life of the earth. He vibrated to the movements not only of the world of people about him but to the material world, every flower of which affected him, not with the borrowed pathos of association, but with a sort of personal kinship and regard. He never would set an oak the task of talking or thinking a pretty love-idyll, but, in a far more profound sense, he would believe it to be constantly palpitating and brooding. The universe to him was not contrived as a sort of theological orrery in order to instruct peo ン |