fault where the public was concerned, must have felt the reading of these few ill-advised lines like the pouring of vinegar into an open wound. That illness had not broken his fighting spirit is made abundantly clear by an inscription in a copy of the book' which he sent to Mr. Davenport, a Hampstead neighbour. In this copy, before the Advertisement, Keats wrote: "This is none of my doing. I was ill at the time," and at the end he put: “This is a lie."

Why Keats did not write this same denial in all his presentation copies, it is not easy to understand. But I have never seen it in any other, and I have examined not a few. For what reason Mr. Davenport was singled out as the recipient of this unique confidence, we shall never know. Probably some conversation not recorded was the cause. One would have supposed that Keats might have wanted Hazlitt to know the truth, but Hazlitt's copy2 has on its fly-leaf only the pleasant and unimpassioned legend: "To Wm Hazlitt Esqre with the Author's sincere respects." The inscription in the copy given to Fanny Brawne is extraordinarily laconic. Keats could not bear to write anything personal in a book which might be seen by others. His secrecy where his love was concerned was carried to an alarming point, and it is the answer to Fanny Brawne's well-known, but quite misunderstood, remark to Dilke ten years after Keats's death, that "the kindest act would be to let him rest for ever in the obscurity to which circumstances have condemned him." Fanny Brawne was not referring to Keats's poetry when she wrote this, she was thinking of, and replying to, a request made to her by Brown in 1829. Brown was proposing to write a Life of Keats and had asked her to permit him to publish one of Keats's last letters to him which was almost entirely about her, although her name was not mentioned. Keats's letter will be given in the next chapter, and

1 Author's Collection. 2 Day Collection.

3 Author's Collection.

my readers can judge whether any woman could have permitted such a letter to appear when she knew how agonizingly the author of it had begged her not to let any detail of their relations, even the bare fact of their mutual love, pass her lips. Well as she understood that Keats's extreme sensitiveness on the subject was the result of the morbidness due to disease, the injunction to her was sacred. She knew, as no one else did, how Keats had dreaded publicity. and in this remark (an answer, undoubtedly, to some farther suggestion of a biography) we see her protecting him even after death. The expression of her feeling was unfortunate, certainly, but that it was misleading was exactly what Keats would have wished. She had read his letters to her; Dilke had not. It need not surprise us, then, that all he wrote in her copy of the Lamia volume was, in his most careful hand: "F. B. from J. K." The book, however, is full bound in diamond-tooled calf, a habit of Keats's with very special copies of his various works.

In the beginning, Taylor and Hessey seem to have had some idea of printing the poems in the Lamia volume as separate books or pamphlets. On the back of one of the pages of a manuscript of Lamia,1 a manuscript in Keats's handwriting, is a faint pencil memorandum (not by Keats) to this effect:

This day are published in 8 vo. form 3 shillings each

Five Poems:

I Isabella

2 Lamia

3 St. Agnes

4 Poems, Miscellaneous

5 Hyperion, a fragment.

The whole in 1 Vol. 8vo., price 12 & 6."

1 Bemis Collection.