scattered like stray-gifts. Wordsworth’s “Stray Pleasures.”
Sir Fopling Flutter, in Sir George Etherege’s comedy “The Man of Mode” (1676).
P. 339, n. a friend. Charles Lamb.
[P. 340.] leurre de dupe, a decoy. The expression occurs in the fourth book of Rousseau’s “Confessions.”
a load to sink a navy. “Henry VIII,” iii, 2, 383.
Marcian Calonna is a dainty book. Lamb’s “Sonnet to the Author of Poems Published under the Name of Barry Cornwall.”
[P. 341.] Keats. Hazlitt shared the popular conception of Keats as an effeminate poet. He concludes the essay “On Effeminacy of Character” in “Table Talk” with a reference to Keats: “I cannot help thinking that the fault of Mr. Keats’s poems was a deficiency in masculine energy of style. He had beauty, tenderness, delicacy, in an uncommon degree, but there was a want of strength and substance. His Endymion is a very delightful description of the illusions of a youthful imagination, given up to airy dreams—we have flowers, clouds, rainbows, moonlight, all sweet sounds and smells, and Oreads and Dryads flitting by—but there is nothing tangible in it, nothing marked or palpable—we have none of the hardy spirit or rigid forms of antiquity. He painted his own thoughts and character; and did not transport himself into the fabulous and heroic ages. There is a want of action, of character, and so far, of imagination, but there is exquisite fancy. All is soft and fleshy, without bone or muscle. We see in him the youth, without the manhood of poetry. His genius breathed ‘vernal delight and joy.’—‘Like Maia’s son he stood and shook his plumes,’ with fragrance filled. His mind was redolent of spring. He had not the fierceness of summer, nor the richness of autumn, and winter he seemed not to have known, till he felt the icy hand of death!” Again in the introduction to the “Select British Poets” (Works, V, 378), he says that Keats “gave the greatest promise of genius of any poet of his day. He displayed extreme tenderness, beauty, originality, and delicacy of fancy; all he wanted was manly strength and fortitude to reject the temptations of singularity in sentiment and expression. Some of his shorter and later pieces are, however, as free from faults as they are full of beauties.”
Come like shadows. “Macbeth,” iv, 1, 111.
Tiger-moth’s wings and Blushes with blood. Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes.”
Words, words. “Hamlet,” ii, 2, 194.