permit the erasure of every word except those words to which he himself limited his epitaph." The erasure has never been made. As long as the addition remains, it will misrepresent the man and the true circumstances of his death. Keats died of hereditary consumption; the autopsy was definitive proof of that. Doubtless his voracious imagination, with no hope to feed upon, weakened his resisting powers and hastened the end. The effect of the reviews was so remote and insignificant as to be altogether negligible. Severn testifies that Keats never once mentioned the "Blackwood's" attacks.

For a decade his good repute was confined to a few friends and casual readers. Those who had the material to write a biography and defend his character were embroiled with each other and delayed publication. Miss Brawne, it is reported, said that the kindest act his friends could do would be to let him rest in oblivion. His notoriety, however, did not die away. In the political quarrels of the magazines his case was a pretext for charges and recriminations. Though unhonored, his name was not forgotten.

In 1829, very unexpectedly to his friends, Galignani in Paris reprinted his poems with a memoir. English visitors in Rome those were

the years of "Young England" and Reform began to hunt up Severn and inquire about the graves of Shelley and Keats. When Severn went to England in 1838 he found some considerable interest in Keats, an increasing interest. In 1840 there was issued a collected edition of his works. Two more soon followed. In 1848 Richard Monckton Milnes, a man of social prestige, though not yet Lord Houghton, published “The Life and Letters of John Keats." This book first lifted the dead poet into distinction and set his character aright before the world. A paragraph from the first edition (omitted in the second) sketches the Keats myth as it then existed in the popular fancy.

"I perceived," said Milnes, "that many who heartily admired his poetry looked on it as the production of a wayward and erratic genius, self-indulgent in conceits, disrespectful of rules and limitations of art, not only unlearned but careless of knowledge, not only exaggerated but despising proportion. I knew that his moral disposition was assumed to be weak, gluttonous of sensual excitement, querulous of severe judgment, fantastic in tastes and lackadaisical in its sentiments. He was all but universally believed to have been killed by a stupid savage article in

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a review, and to a compassion generated by an untoward fate, he was held to owe a certain personal interest which his poetic reputation hardly justified."

With such false impressions to correct, Milnes wisely decided that a conventional biography, by an advocate, would be unconvincing. Therefore he simply published the documentary evidence; the letters, the testimony of associates; the poems; these interlarded with his own comments and criticisms.

It did its work most effectively. The increase of attention to Keats during the next few years was very gratifying. In 1849 Samuel Phillips reviewed the "Life" in the London "Times" and reprinted the article. In 1852 the Earl of Belfast associated Keats with Moore and Scott in a public lecture. In 1853 Keats was included in "The Lives of the Illustrious." That same year De Quincey's essay was published and Jeffrey's review of "Endymion" was reprinted. There are numerous magazine articles about this time. In 1857 Keats found due recognition in the Encyclopædia Britannica, an assurance of dignity for the future.

For a long time the "Life and Letters" remained the authentic source-book of information