Extracts from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 3 (1818) pp. 519–524. Nineteenth Century Literary Manuscripts, Part 4. Retrieved 29 January 2010. "To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is, of course, ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr John Keats.... He was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady ... For some time we were in hopes that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The phrenzy of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion.... It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the [apothecary] shop Mr John, back to 'plasters, pills, and ointment boxes' ".
The 1888 Encyclopædia Britannica declared that, "Of these [odes] perhaps the two nearest to absolute perfection, to the triumphant achievement and accomplishment of the very utmost beauty possible to human words, may be that of to Autumn and that on a Grecian Urn" Thomas Baynes, ed. Encyclopædia Britannica Vol. XIV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1888. OCLC1387837, p. 23.
