ror, but when they fall on me, they close gently, open quietly and close again till he sinks to sleep." It was a death without the clergy. There was no anointing with oil; no laying on of apostolic hands; only Jeremy Taylor's "Holy Living and Holy Dying" and Severn praying by the bedside. The lonely vigils of the death watch, day after day, night after night—for he lingered on brought the faithful overstrained comrade to the verge of collapse. Yet he held up until the end. And the last hours, the two, hand in hand but no alien pen has a privilege here. Four days later Severn, utterly prostrated, managed to scrawl a few tremulous lines - an unfinished letter to Brown that was never sent and to sketch on the sheet, as a relief — art's relief for tragic realities — the symbolic figure of his own inexpressible grief. "He is gone. He died with the greatest ease. He seemed to go to sleep. On Friday the 23rd, at half-past four the approach of death came on. 'Severn- I - lift me up, for I am dying. I shall die easy. Don't be frightened! Thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms and the phlegm seemed boiling in his throat. This increased until eleven at night, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet that I still thought he slept but I cannot say more now. I am broken down beyond my strength, I cannot be left alone. I have not slept for nine days, I will say the days since On Saturday a gentleman came to cast the face, hand and foot. On Sunday the body was opened; the lungs were completely gone, the doctors could not conceive how he had lived in the last two months. Dr. Clark will write you on this head-›› XXIX POSTHUMOUS FAME The champaign with its endless fleece THE Protestant Cemetery is on the edge of the Campagna. For nineteen centuries the gray pyramid of Cestius has guarded the spot. St. Paul passed it by on his way to martyrdom. Here Keats lies in the shadow of the pagan tomb. It is pleasant to think that the ashes of Shelley lie close beside him. For Shelley only, of all the contemporaries, delivered the judgment that came in the fullness of time. The "Adonais” is prophecy come literally true. The first reception of this elegy shows that even death could not mollify the enemy. "Blackwood's" parodied the "Adonais” in an "Elegy on a Tomcat." It asserted that a hundred thousand such verses could be easily written, and 66 granted the poem only five readable lines. When the news came of Shelley's own tragic end, the fact that he had the last volume by Keats in his pocket was made the occasion for more ribaldry. ‘What a rash man Shelley was to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack's poetry on board! Why, man, it would sink a trireme. I lay a wager that it righted soon after ejecting Jack." Christopher North was just as merciless in his "Noctes Ambrosianæ." In 1822, shortly after Keats' death, he published a doggerel sonnet in Italian addressed to Hunt and him. Keats was bantered as Don Giovanni d' Endymioni, il gran poeta d'Ipecachuanha and un gran Giacasso. Twenty years later the "Blackwood's" hostility died down with a querulous apology. It never intended, it said, to hurt Keats' lungs. It asked contemptuously if, when reviewing, the printer's proofs must first be read to a poet while a physician, with thumb on his pulse, indicates how much criticism he can endure. Some of the wits made merry over the grave. Severn relates that often in Rome he heard English travelers utter jibes about the epitaph. "Here lies one whose name was writ in water," they said, "and his poetry in milk and water." He adds that pitiful account of his showing Keats' picture to the old broken Scott and of Scott's distress at the sight of it. "Yes, yes," muttered the conscience-stricken Sir Walter, turning hastily away, "the world finds out these things for itself at last."1 Of course the fiction that Keats' death was due to brutal criticism caused some reaction in his favor. Shelley's indignation in "Adonais," Byron's persiflage, that unauthorized addition to the epitaph have done much to establish the tradition that the poet died reviling the reviews. As late as 1860 George Eliot believed it. She wrote from Rome of the tomb, "It is painful to look upon, because of the inscription on the stone, which seems to make him still speak in bitterness from his grave." The tradition is not yet wholly dispelled from the popular mind. But all the good it can do has been done, and it should be cleared away, once and for all, in justice to the truth and Keats' self-reliance. Brown was responsible for the addition. It was his own resentment which supplied the false interpretation to Keats' dying request. He acknowledged the mistake. "Swayed by a natural feeling I advised more," he wrote in 1836 to Severn. "I have long repented of my fault and must repeat what I said to you in Rome, 'I hope the government will 1 Cf. |