the 1817 volume. This book contained transcripts of the 'Specimen of an Induction,' 'Calidore,' 'On receiving a Curious Shell,' 'Imitation of Spenser,' and several of the Sonnets. It had passed into the hands of John Scott, editor of 'The London Magazine,' who was killed in a duel with a Mr. Christie arising out of the abominable 'Cockney School' articles in 'Blackwood's Magazine.' Tom Keats had visited Scott in Paris; and it may have been on that occasion that the copy-book passed into Scott's possession.

A more important document acquired by myself about the same time, and still in my collection, was a curious volume originally used for writing fair copies of poems in-poems from various hands. At a later stage it was converted into a scrap-book,-newspaper cuttings and other curiosities being stuck over pages of George Keats's writing; and in one part several of George's copies from John's poems are inserted, having at their head the autograph manuscript of the sonnet to Mrs. George Keats (when Miss Wylie), whom I suppose to have been the owner of the book, seeing that it contains among its curiosities the original parchment commission of James Wylie, as adjutant of the Fifeshire Regiment of Fencible Infantry, signed by George III. in 1794.

The numerous letters to and from Haydon, preserved in the journals of the painter, filled up important blanks and supplied a great number of additions and

corrections.

The manuscripts of 'Endymion,' 'Lamia,' 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' 'Isabella,' 'Otho the Great,' and 'The Cap and Bells,' may be mentioned as especially fruitful of various readings and cancelled passages; but most of Keats's principal works and a great mass of the minor poems have been revised from manuscript sources; and not the least of the fortunate chances attending my efforts was the discovery of Richard Woodhouse's copy of the published 'Endymion,' in which were noted, not only the variations of the final manuscript from the printed text, but also those of the first draft, which had not itself come to the surface. Woodhouse seems to have been an ardent admirer of Keats and an enthusiastic student of his works, as well as an excellent scholar; for his copy of 'Endymion' was interleaved, seemingly while Keats was still alive, and the textual differences were noted down in the most business-like and elaborate manner, while the pages bear many remarks and hints of a learned and acute kind, whereof I have not scrupled to avail myself. So far as regards the largest of Keats's poems, this book has been of more service than either of the other printed copies of 'Endymion' I have used, namely Sir Charles Dilke's copy and one in my own possession with a number of autograph corrections. But Sir Charles Dilke's copy has a quantity of manuscript poems bound up at the end; and these have yielded a good deal of assistance in textual work.

The letters of Keats to his sister, which form so large a proportion of the letters first published by me in 1883, threw a flood of new light on his character. We knew him in nearly all relations except that of a protecting brother to a younger sister; and it is this hiatus in his fascinating personality that these delightful letters fill.

After the Library edition was published, there appeared an American issue of Lord Houghton's edition of the poetry, together with a volume of letters, superintended by Mr. J. G. Speed, who, being a grandson of George Keats, had access to some of the papers formerly preserved at Louisville in Kentucky, and was enabled to publish one new letter of considerable interest as well as several passages omitted from previous printed versions.

Later still Mr. Colvin's admirable volume for the Men of Letters Series was written and brought out. It first appeared in 1887. Not only is it, as an appreciation of Keats's character and works, highly valuable; but it is based upon material of which much had not then (and some has not yet) been published. Of much of this material Mr. Colvin gave me the benefit of consultation at first hand for the purposes of a revision of my Library edition published in 1889 and of the volume entitled 'Poetry and Prose of John Keats' published the next year.

The following is Mr. Colvin's own account of his special material:

"In addition to printed materials I have made use of the following unprinted, viz. :

"I. Houghton MSS. Under this title I refer to the contents of an album from the library at Fryston Hall, in which the late Lord Houghton bound up a quantity of the materials he had used in the preparation of the 'Life and Letters,' as well as of correspondence concerning Keats addressed to him both before and after the publication of his book. The chief contents are the manuscript memoir of Keats by Charles Brown, which was offered by the writer in vain to Galignani, and I believe other publishers; transcripts by the same hand of a few of Keats's poems; reminiscences or brief memoirs of the poet by his friends Charles Cowden Clarke, Henry Stephens, George Felton Mathew, Joseph Severn, and Benjamin Bailey; together with letters from all the above, from John Hamilton Reynolds, and several others. For the use of this collection, without which my work must have been attempted to little purpose, I am indebted to the kindness of its owner, the present Lord Houghton.1

"II. Woodhouse MSS. A. A common-place book in which Richard Woodhouse, the friend of Keats and of his publishers Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, transcribed—as would appear from internal evidence, about midsummer 1819the chief part of Keats's poems at that date unpublished. The transcripts are in many cases made from early drafts of the poems: some contain gaps which Woodhouse has filled up in pencil from later drafts: to others are added corrections, or suggestions for corrections, some made in the hand of Mr. Taylor and some in that of Keats himself.

"III. Woodhouse MSS. B. A note-book in which the same Woodhouse has copied evidently for Mr. Taylor, at the time when that gentleman was meditating a biography of the poet-a number of letters addressed by Keats to Mr. Taylor himself, to the transcriber, to Reynolds and his sisters, to Rice, and

1 Now the Earl of Crewe.

Bailey. Three or four of these letters, as well as portions of a few others, are unpublished.1

"Both the volumes last named were formerly the property of Mrs. Taylor, a niece by marriage of the publisher, and are now my own. A third note-book by Woodhouse, containing personal notices and recollections of Keats, was unluckily destroyed in the fire at Messrs Kegan Paul and Co's. premises in 1883...

"IV. Severn MSS. The papers and correspondence left by the late Joseph Severn, containing materials for what should be a valuable biography, have been put into the hands of Mr. William Sharp, to be edited and published at his discretion.2 In the meantime Mr. Sharp has been so kind as to let me have access to such parts of them as relate to Keats. The most important single piece, an essay on 'The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame,' has been printed already in the 'Atlantic Monthly'..., but in the remainder I have found many interesting details, particularly concerning Keats's voyage to Italy and life at Rome.

"V. Rawlings v. Jennings. When Keats's maternal grandfather, Mr. John Jennings, died in 1805, leaving property exceeding the amount of the specific bequests under his will, it was thought necessary that his estate should be administered by the Court of Chancery, and with that intent a friendly suit was brought in the names of his daughter and her second husband (Frances Jennings, m. 1st Thomas Keats, and 2nd William Rawlings) against her mother and brother, who were the executors. The proceedings in this suit are referred to under the above title. They are complicated and voluminous, extending over a period of twenty years, and my best thanks are due to Mr. Ralph Thomas, of 27 Chancery Lane, for his friendly pains in searching through and making abstracts of them."

By 1889 Mr. Colvin had in his hands the holographs of some of the most important of Keats's letter. to George and Georgiana Keats in America, showing portentous variations from published texts and a surprising mass of unpublished or imperfectly published matter. Of these also I had the use in 1889. Since then (1891) Mr. Colvin has used the same material in his Letters of John Keats to his Family and Friends; and I myself published in a single volume in 1895 the whole of Keats's then known letters, chronologically arranged. These included several discovered after 1891.

In the Athenæum for the 23rd of January 1891, Professor Jenks of Melbourne in Victoria announced the discovery of a highly important volume of Keats manuscripts, formerly belonging to George Keats; and this volume is now in the

1 This statement still stands, no doubt through oversight, in the current issue of Mr. Colvin's book; but both he and I have published the letters and passages referred to since 1887; and they will be found in the present edition.

2 Mr. Sharp's book came out in 1892 under the title 'The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn.' The Severn manuscripts were of course not used by me in any way. The printed book is, equally of course, among the works consulted for the present edition.

'British Museum.' It contains holograph copies, by the poet, of 'Isabella,' the Mermaid Tavern lines, and 'The Eve of St. Mark,' and also transcripts of 'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,' 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' the Odes on Melancholy, to a Nightingale, and on a Grecian Urn, 'Welcome Joy, and Welcome Sorrow,' 'Where's the Poet?' the Ode to Autumn, the Robin Hood lines, some lines by L. E. L. on a portrait of Keats, three stanzas of ‘Adonais,' and a sonnet by the Honourable Mrs. Norton. Placed loosely in the volume are a transcript of the 'Lines written in the Scotch Highlands' and some verses addressed by "an unknown bard" to one of George Keats's daughters. The book has proved on careful collation to be most valuable.

Of work attributed to Keats in former editions and rejected from the present volumes there is very little; but of such rejection as has been necessary an account should be rendered. The poem and sonnet given The poem and sonnet given in Lord Houghton's Aldine edition (and others) as of doubtful authenticity are both omitted because I do not think that Keats had anything more to do with the poem than with the sonnet, which is to be found among Laman Blanchard's works, and is assigned to that author in several anthologies, as for instance in Leigh Hunt's 'Book of the Sonnet,' Dr. Mackay's 'A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry,' and Mr. John Dennis's 'English Sonnets.' Lord Houghton has recorded his belief that the sonnet was "one of George Byron's forgeries" (Aldine edition, page 493); but at page 326, the poem commencing with the words "What sylph-like form before my eyes," is introduced by a suggestion that there were genuine pieces among the forgeries sold at the George Byron "autograph" auction. My own belief is that, so far as the actual documents are concerned, all were forged; but that many of them were copies, in assumed hands, of genuine documents. Some of the Shelley letters certainly were; and I think it is only a question of time how soon this particular piece of verse shall be traced to the source outside Keats's work from which George Byron copied it. The letter beginning "My dear Spencer" which was printed at pages 27 and 28 of the edition of Keats's Life and Letters published in 1867, and the letter beginning "My dear Haydon," printed at pages 49-51 of the same volume, are omitted on similar grounds. Both seem to me unlike Keats in all respects; and both are from the George Byron sale, the Haydon one being moreover addressed to "W. Haydon" instead of "B. R. Haydon." The song "Stay, ruby-breasted warbler, stay," given at page 6 of the Aldine edition, was probably sent to Lord Houghton from America. I omit it because, in the scrapbook mentioned at page xi containing a mass of transcripts by George Keats from his brother's poetry, this poem is not only written in George's hand but signed "G.K." instead of "J.K."; and indeed it reads more like one of the effusions which George is recorded to have produced than an early poem by John.

From the same scrap book a sonnet attributed by George Keats to his brother John was extracted for the Library edition in 1883. It is the sonnet beginning with the line

Brother belov'd if health shall smile again,

and passed without public challenge as Keats's till I discovered it by chance.

among Mrs. Tighe's posthumous poems, and of course withdrew it at once from my current editions of Keats and made confession of the mistake into which George Keats had unwittingly lured me. No doubt Keats had copied it at some time from the volume containing 'Psyche' (which he greatly admired) and some minor poems, and so deceived his brother without intending to do so.

Another piece which I was led to attribute to Keats was a delightful set of couplets issued by Leigh Hunt in 'The Indicator' for the 19th of January 1820, headed 'Vox et Præterea Nihil.' After a long discussion with the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, I concluded that these beautiful lines had been written by Keats as a part of 'Endymion,' in one of the foot-notes to which I inserted them with the suggestion that they had been intended to come between lines 853 and 854 of Book III, and had been rejected by Keats as overweighting the passage. This suggestion also passed unchallenged for thirteen years, after which, through the courtesy of Mr. Bryan Charles Waller, author of 'The Twilight Land' and 'Perseus with the Hesperides,' I was made aware that 'Vox et Præterea Nihil' was to be found in a volume of poetry by his uncle Bryan Waller Procter ("Barry Cornwall").1 Of this false ascription also due confession was made, and the couplets were cancelled in the current edition of Keats's poetry. How they had betrayed me and others may be judged from the single sample

Like the low voice of Syrinx when she ran
Into the forests from Arcadian Pan;

strongly resembling a couplet in 'Endymion'

Telling us how fair, trembling Syrinx fled

Arcadian Pan, with such a horrid dread.

It is believed that the five volumes, of which the first goes forth next month, contain everything of Keats's which has come to the surface since 1883, and that this edition, besides a great mass of work that is not in any other, embodies all that is elsewhere in print, whether in published editions, lives, or essays.

In the last quarter of the present expiring century the estimation in which Keats has been held has increased very greatly; and it has seemed desirable to make his whole writings accessible to all classes at the opening of the new century, and that in a form at once handy and compact and having all the essential advantages of a Library edition.

Regarded as pure literature, the work of Keats has qualities which place it close to that of Shakespeare. It is not claimed for him that he is the greatest English poet since Shakespeare: such a claim were impious to the memory of Milton, of Wordsworth, of Shelley, of Byron,-not to mention others who have followed Shakespeare in the long and glorious roll of our poets. The term "great poet" is comprehensive: before using it one weighs the claimant's intellect, his imagination, his psychic energy, his powers of creation generally. It could not be maintained

1'Marcian Colonna an Italian Tale with Three Dramatic Scenes and other Poems,' published by John Warren and C. & J. Ollier in 1820. In this volume the title is enlarged to 'A Voice-Vox et Praeterea Nihil.'