your practice than you have been in your poetry." It is as well to place these words plainly before the reader (words deliberately printed in high class journals, whose conductors have, doubtless, repented long ago in dust and ashes on behalf of their fathers in office), not for the ungracious purpose of exhuming the dead, as specimens of all but obsolete criticism, but that the strength (or weakness, if you will) of the “ Article " which Byron, in “Don Juan,” Canto II., stanza 59, would have the world believe killed the poet may be measured and found wanting. Lord Jeffrey, on the other hand, in the Edinburgh (six years later than his "This will never do," over the "Excursion "), while recognising prominent demerits, said "We are very much inclined, indeed, to add, that we do not know any book which we would sooner employ as a test to ascertain whether any one had in him a native relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm; " while Shelley wrote a letter of remonstrance to the editor of the Quarterly (couched in very different terms, it must be confessed, from those hissed through his teeth in the "Adonais")-which, however, was never sent. What of Keats? No doubt he was deeply hurt. He must have felt even then what he said to his brother in 1819-"My name with the literary fashionables is vulgar; I am a weaver boy to them," and yet Cowden Clarke could say of him,

Had he been born in squalor he would have emerged a gentleman." Byron was wide of his

mark for all that-it was not the "Article" that killed him, as we shall see. It would seem that Shelley shared Byron's belief on this subject. Keats could at least write in calm and independent spirit-" Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict; and also when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine." His words to his brother are- "This is a mere matter of the moment. I think I shall be among the English poets after my death." He made a tour in Scotland and Ireland in July and August of the same year. His friend Charles Armitage Brown accompanied him. Certainly his letters betray nothing like "giving in" on account of the attacks which had been made upon him. Poetry of the ephemeral order (what he expressly called "doggerel ") and descriptions of scenery were sent home in considerable quantities as the pedestrians passed onwards. There can be little doubt Keats over-exerted himself, and his throat at length became so inflamed that he was obliged to leave his companion at Inverness, and return to London. Here, towards the close of the year, his brother Thomas died, after being faithfully nursed by the poet, whose health suffered severely from the anxiety.

B

The picture of Keats's life need not be large in surface, but-if it is to resemble the original-it must be deep in perspective, and in the farther recess the figure of a fair woman will be found controlling all other outlines and colours. Keats was twenty-three when his first meeting with Fanny Brawne (afterwards Mrs. Lindon) took place in October or November 1818. Even a comparatively careless reader of the poems which had by this time seen the light could scarcely fail to detect that the spirit which conceived them had already prefigured its own ripening needs, and that Woman must inevitably touch such an one to finer, if sadder, issues. Hitherto Keats seems to have kept himself wonderfully free from the grip of—if not the dalliance with-love, his three sonnets on woman notwithstanding! Not so long before the meeting took place he had written, "Nothing strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love. A man in love, I do think, cuts the sorryest figure in the world. Even when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it, I could burst out laughing in his face. His pathetic visage becomes irresistible;" a thought which tickled his fancy so much that he threw his impressions into a farce of a rhyme which he called "A party of Lovers." But in another letter he writes-"The voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these three days," which is not to be identified with Fanny Brawne (as Lord Houghton believed), but with Miss Cox, the cousin of Keats's friend, J. H.

Reynolds, as proved by Mr. F. Buxton Forman— whose whole-hearted care and discrimination has made his superb edition of the poet's works a complete repository on this and other questions. Keats was, however, sufficient master of himself to write nearly a year later-"I feel every confidence that if I choose I may be a popular writer! That I will never be. I equally dislike the favour of the public with the love of a woman. They are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence." Nor did example do more for him in these days. Writing to his brother George, who had emigrated to America, taking with him a young wife in whose love he professed to have happiness great enough to allow of his advising his brother to marry, the poet ungallantly retorts-"Notwithstanding your happiness and your recommendations, I hope I shall never marry, though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk! Though the carpet were of silk, and the curtains of the morning clouds, the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnets' down, the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winandermere, I should not feel, or rather my happiness should not be so fine; my solitude is sublime," and so on. Ah, how gladly would he have married the woman he loved without any of these things, when his own time came-as come it did, bringing with it a fervency that consumed his frail body. He did not forget how he had ridiculed the lover, for in the very first published letter to Fanny

Brawne he writes-"I would not have you see those rhapsodies which I once thought it impossible I should ever give way to, and which I have often laughed at in another." This very letter, by the way, was sold to Mr. Oscar Wilde on 2nd January 1885, for no less a sum than £18; another of the letters, however, fetched more than double that price. What would poor Keats have said to these figures, and even to the publication of his letters ; and yet he did say playfully to his sweetheart"Our correspondence at some future time I propose offering to Murray"-if not, Reeves and Turner. But now, that which Keats had ridiculed was to be repeated in himself. All his words flew off ashamed of themselves, and his life henceforth became absorbed in the life of another. To change the pronoun is all that is necessary in the very beautiful description of Elaines' love for Lancelot"He lifted up his eyes,

And loved her with that love which was his doom."

His doom, literally; for while it is difficult to believe he could have ultimately escaped the disease of which he died, it is impossible to doubt that the strength of his love hastened his going. When the aged Severn received Keats's published letters to Fanny Brawne, he sent the editor of the volume a letter (dated 5th February which these words 1878) in occur "The thirty-seven letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne I have read with great pain, inasmuch as from them