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 140 they feel when William Maginn brutally declared that Keats

was but a cockney poet, who wrote vulgar indecorums, "probably in the indulgence of his social propensities"? How did they feel when the same Maginn called the Adonais "dreary nonsense" and "a wild waste of words," and devoted bitter pages to proving that Shelley was not only undeserving, but "hopeless of poetic reputation"? Yet surely indignation must have melted into laughter, when this notable reviewer—who has been recently reprinted as a shining light for the new generation—added serenely that "a hundred or a hundred thousand verses might be made, equal to the best in Adonais, without taking the pen off the paper." This species of sweeping assertion has been repeated by critics more than once, to the annoyance of their friends and the malicious delight of their enemies. Ruskin, who, with all his gifts, seems cursed with what Mr. Bagehot calls "a mind of contrary flexure, whose particular bent it is to contradict what those around them say," has