marauders, most of whom he has seduced to the practice of dishonesty. He has the cunning of the maturest villain, and contrives never to be implicated in the execution of the plans which he concocts for his followers. He has been well trained to this delicate business by his own parents, who are known and experienced fences; and so well skilled in the management of their trade, as to have escaped all contact with the police for seven years together.

The above are a few of the infant voices which cry aloud from the silence of our prison-walls. What is the language which they speak? And what response does it demand? And who shall utter that response, and when?

THE LIFE AND POETRY OF KEATS.

JOHN KEATS was born, October 29, 1796, of humble parents, who resided in Moorfields, London. While a mere boy at a school in Enfield, he gave such token of the possession of poetical talents, as attracted the attention of his teachers, by whom he was encouraged to compose exercises in verse. At the age of fifteen, he was bound as an apprentice to a surgeon in the metropolis, and in this situation he continued to devote much of his attention to poetry; but it was not till he had completed his twentieth year, that any effort was made by himself or his friends to bring his productions before the world. About the close of the year 1816, a sonnet of his composition having been received into the Examiner newspaper, a friend of the young poet called upon the editor, Mr Leigh Hunt, with a few similar productions, to which the attention of that gentleman was respectfully invited, but without the disclosure of the author's name. According to Mr Hunt's own declaration, he had not been led by experience of such matters to expect much pleasure from the perusal of them; but

his eye had not wandered over a dozen lines of the com. positions now submitted to him, when he found reason to believe that their author was, in the highest sense of the word, a poet. In an article, accordingly, entitled 'Young Poets,' which appeared in the Examiner of the 1st of December 1816, John Keats was introduced in favourable terms to public notice, in conjunction with two individuals, one of whom at least has amply fulfilled the anticipations of the critic. From that time pieces by Mr Keats appeared occasionally in the Examiner, till, in May of the ensuing year, these and other poems, chiefly composed in his teens, were presented to the world in a volume bearing his name. About the same time, Mr Keats abandoned his profession, the duties of which had never been agreeable to him.

The volume was such as might have been expected from a mind so young and inexperienced, and which was intoxicated with the spirit of poetry, rather than possessed of its power. It was full of obscure gleamings of something fine, but at the same time replete with rhodomontade and errors in point of taste. Even the editor of the Examiner, who had been the first to speak favourably of Mr Keats's talents, and to exert himself to make them known, mingled, with the praise he bestowed on this volume, many censures and many warnings. Yet, with all its faults, it contained passages which every unprejudiced person of poetical feeling must have pronounced to be in the highest degree beautiful-such, for instance, as the following Aspiration after Poetry:—

'O Poesy! for thee I grasp my pen,
That am not yet a glorious denizen

Of thy wide heaven; yet, to my ardent prayer,
Yield from thy sanctuary some clear air,
Smoothed for intoxication by the breath
Of flowering bays, that I may die a death
Of luxury, and my young spirit follow
The morning sunbeams to the great Apollo
Like a fresh sacrifice; or, if I can bear

The o'erwhelming sweets, 'twill bring to me the fair
Visions of all places: a bowery nook

Will be elysium-an eternal book

Whence I may copy many a lovely saying
About the leaves and flowers-about the playing
Of nymphs in woods and fountains; and the shade
Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid;

And many a verse from so strange influence
That we must ever wonder how and whence
It came. Also imaginings will hover
Round my fireside, and haply there discover
Vistas of solemn beauty, where I'd wander
In happy silence, like the clear meander
Through its lone vales; and where I found a spot
Of awfuller shade, or an enchanted grot,
Or a green hill o'erspread with chequered dress
Of flowers, and fearful from its loveliness,
Write on my tablets all that was permitted,
All that was for our human senses fitted.
Then the events of this wide world I'd seize
Like a strong giant, and my spirit tease
Till at its shoulders it should proudly see
Wings to find out an immortality!'

Having fully committed himself to a literary life, Mr Keats produced, in the ensuing year, another volume, entitled Endymion, a Poetic Romance, in which neither the faults nor the beauties of the former were in any degree diminished. The subject was the well-known classic fable of the loves of Endymion and the Moon. The characters and histories of the Greek mythology, and the fine poetry in which they have been embalmed by the ancients, had made a deep impression on this young poet, and he had pondered and dreamed upon them till they grew into a new being under his hands. To a mind so entranced and contemplative as his, the tale of Endymion naturally became something far beyond and above what it appears in the classic originals; and the consequence was, a pouring forth of a long chain of dreamy and mystical, but most poetical imaginings upon the subject, the whole moulded into the form of a tale. It opens with the description of a procession, from which the following are extracts:

'Now while the silent workings of the dawn
Were busiest, into that self-same lawn,

All suddenly, with joyful cries, there sped

A troop of little children garlanded;

Who, gathering round the altar, seemed to pry
Earnestly round as wishing to espy

Some folk of holiday: nor had they waited
For many moments, ere their ears were sated
With a faint breath of music, which even then
Filled out its voice, and died away again.
Within a little space again it gave

Its airy swellings with a gentle wave

To light-hung leaves, in smoothest echoes breaking
Through copse-clad valleys-ere their death, o'ertaking
The surgy murmurs of the lonely sea.

*

*

*

*

Leading the way young damsels danced along,
Bearing the burden of a shepherd song;

Each having a white wicker, overbrimmed

With April's tender younglings; next, well-trimmed,
A crowd of shepherds with as sunburnt looks

As may be read of in Arcadian books;
Such as sat listening round Apollo's pipe,
When the great deity, for earth too ripe,
Let his divinity o'erflowing die

In music through the vales of Thessaly:

Some idly trailed their sheep-hooks on the ground,
And some kept up a shrilly mellow sound
With ebon-tippèd flutes; close after these,
Now coming from beneath the forest trees,
A venerable priest full soberly

Begirt with ministering looks; alway his eye
Steadfast upon the matted turf he kept,

And after him his sacred vestments swept.'

In Endymion there are many detached lines and couplets of great beauty. He speaks of Zephyrus, the deity of the west wind,

'Fondling the flower amid the sobbing rain.'

He describes Peona, the sister of Endymion, sitting beside him while he slept,

'as a willow keeps

A patient watch over the stream that creeps
Windingly by it.'

Endymion wanders

Through the green evening quiet in the sun,

O'er many a heath and many a woodland dun;

Through buried paths where sleepy twilight dreams
The summer-time away.'

Of a drowned maiden, he says:

'Cold, O cold, indeed,

Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed,

The sea-swell took her hair.'

The beauties of this poem were perceived, beneath its extravagances, by many individuals of talent; but there were a few critics, of political professions opposed to those of Mr Keats's principal friends, who, for no other reason, apparently, than his having received friendship at such hands, undertook to denounce his poetical pretensions -a task which it was not difficult to perform, as his poetry contained a sufficient number of passages to convince any one not disposed to look further, that he was little better than a raver. No man who has entered the world since those dismal times, could well believe that the spirit of politics could so far blind men of education and talent to the natural sense of justice, as to allow them to compose the papers which appeared respecting Endymion, in the two chief periodical works of the party opposed to the friends of the author. Calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy,' were the terms applied to a poem characterised, as has been allowed, by much extravagance, but which was only so in consequence, apparently, of the excess in which the author was gifted with the poetical spirit. He was also recommended to go back to the shop, back to plasters, pills, and ointment-boxes,' as being unfit to prosecute the higher calling of the Muse. The effect of these vituperations upon the mind of so young and sensitive a being was very severe, and is said to have evidently operated in increasing the consumptive symptoms which his constitution was already exhibiting. To stigmatise the vituperators would be now of little service; but let the fact be a warning to future writers. Between assaults which wound and murder the body, and unconscientious criticisms which torture and destroy the mind, where is the difference?

About two years after the publication of Endymion, and when far advanced in the disease of which he died, Keats published his last volume, entitled, Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and other Poems. The second of these pieces is a tale on the groundwork of one in Boccaccio. It contains the following beautiful passage