ABSTRACT
First published in The Indicator, 28 June 1820, pp. 300–4. It was reprinted in Indicator/Companion, Part II, pp. 7–8. Hunt claimed that Keats, who was then convalescing with the Hunt family in Kentish Town, contributed ‘one or two of the passages’ to this essay The essay stands in many ways as an embodiment of their continuing collaboration during the Indicator years. Traces of the languorous motions of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ surface throughout the essay, especially in the slowing down of the mower’s ‘sweeping cuts’ (below, p. 268). Keats’s own use of the adverb ‘Now’ in his parody of court intrigues from the preceding winter, The Jealousies (ll. 554-8), probably suggested this topic to Hunt. The panoramic sweep of vision in Keats’s court burlesque poem may have worked its way, via the methods of this essay, into Hunt’s vivid portrayal of the Queen’s trial in the Examiner issue of 20 August 1820 (pp. 529–32 and below, pp. 307–14).
