"

REVIEW OF REYNOLDS'S PETER BELL.”

With over waiting, over wan,

Like Susan Harvey's ‡ pan of creams.

'Tis Peter Bell-'tis Peter Bell,
Who never stirreth in the day;
His hand is wither'd-he is old!
On Sundays he is us'd to pray,
In winter he is very cold §.

I've seen him in the month of August,

At the wheat-field, hour by hour,

Picking ear, by ear,-by ear,

Through wind, and rain,—and sun,-and shower,

From year, to year,―to year,—to year.

You never saw a wiser man,

He knows his Numeration Table;

He counts the sheep of Harry Gill |¦,

Every night that he is able,

When the sheep are on the hill.

Betty Foy-My Betty Foy,

Is the aunt of Peter Bell;

And credit me, as I would have you,
Simon Lee was once his nephew,
And his niece is Alice Fell || ||-

He is rurally related;

Peter Bell hath country cousins,
(He had once a worthy mother)
Bells and Peters by the dozens,

But Peter Bell he hath no brother.

Dairy-maid to Mr. Gill.

§ Peter Bell resembleth Harry Gill in this particular:

"His teeth they chatter, chatter, chatter."

cxxvii

I should have introduced this fact in the text, but that Harry Gill would not rhyme. I reserve this for my blank verse.

|| Harry Gill was the original proprietor of Barbara Lewthwaite's pet-lamb; and he also bred Betty Foy's celebrated poney, got originally out of a Night-mare, by a descendant of the great Trojan horse.

||| Mr. Sheridan, in his sweet poem of the Critic, supplies one of his heroes with as singularly clustering a relationship.

Not a brother owneth he,

Peter Bell he hath no brother;
His mother hath no other son,

No other son e'er call'd her mother;

Peter Bell hath brother none.

The foregoing extracts were almost certainly not transcribed by Keats. They are so essentially accurate that they were in all probability set up from the pamphlet itself, or from portions of it cut out for the purpose. It is only in some half-a-dozen instances that it has been necessary to restore the punctuation of the original. The word a before Night-mare, four lines from the foot of the preceding page, seems to have been dropped out accidentally in The Examiner.

ON "RETRIBUTION, OR THE CHIEF

TAIN'S DAUGHTER,"

A TRAGEDY

ACTED AT COVENT GARDEN THEATRE.

[This notice appeared in The Champion for Sunday the 4th of January 1818, under the editorship of John Scott. It is not nearly so good as the foregoing contribution to The Examiner, and does not seem to indicate that Keats would have been very successful if he had seriously attempted to trammel his genius by undertaking periodical hack work. For the circumstances in which this notice was written see page xx of the present volume. The printing is very inexact; and I have not thought it requisite to reproduce every trifling inaccuracy.-H. B. F.]

ON "RETRIBUTION, OR THE CHIEF

TAIN'S DAUGHTER,"

A TRAGEDY

ACTED AT COVENT GARDEN THEATRE.

WHAT exquisite names did our old dramatists christen their plays withal! The title of an old play gives us a direct taste and surmise of its inwards, as the first lines of the Paradise Lost smack of the great Poem. The names of old plays are Dantean inscriptions over the gates of hell, heaven, or purgatory. Some of such enduring pathos that in these days we may not for decency utter them, 'honor dishonorable '-in these days we may but think of passion's seventh heaven, and but just mention how crystalline the third is. The old dramatists and their title pages are old Britain kings and their provinces. The fore page of a love play was ever “to Cupid's service bowed," as "The Mad Lover," "The Broken Heart "-or spake its neighbourhood to the "shores of old romance," as "The Winter's Tale," "The Two Noble Kinsmen."

The title of the play newly acted at Covent Garden set us thinking of these affairs. It had been long announced, and is called "Retribution, or the Chieftain's Daughter." Now this is most wretched; an unpardonable offence, so sans pareilly, so inferior to Mrs. Radcliffe, so germane to a play-bill at a fair, that we will say no