waiving this discussion, a more prace question arises. If the cause of 's death now first presented is the one, how came the other story to gain cy? Several reasons may be as1. Mere sequence would, in this case many others, be taken for cause and Keats was abused by the reviewhe died soon after-their abuse must hastened his death. The Tory scribes ferocious enough not altogether to the reputation of having killed a al poet, and gave at least a negative ragement to the general opinion. liked "good stories" and "points" ch as any Frenchman; the supposed ide of the Quarterly gave him an opity of letting off some saucy doggrel, bove all, flattered him with the ren, so sure to suggest itself to every how differently he had taken the urgh's onslaught. As to Shelley, it his fixed idea that all Conservatives oppressors and murderers, and all als martyrs and victims: that a Tory should assassinate a Liberal bard > him an event in the ordinary course ure. of him, any literary mortification, however severe in itself, could have been little more than a scratch to a man burning to death. Our interest in the catastrophe has made us begin with it. Let us retrace our steps. Keats was born in 1795. His father had begun life as a groom, but did so well as to marry his master's daughter, and, though dying young, to leave £8000 among four children. John was the second son, a handsome, resolute, energetic, pugnacious boy at school, marked out by his young companions for a future military hero, but suddenly taking to study and at last surpassing all his fellow-pupils. He mastered some Latin, but did not attain to Greek; the Classic Mythology he learned from dictionaries, and knew Homer through Chapman. Reading the Faery Queen first incited him to write poetry; and his biographer here truly remarks that "the just critic of his maturer poems will not fail to trace to the influence of the study of Spenser much that at first appears forced and fantastical both in idea and expression, and discover that precisely those defects which are commonly attributed to an extravagant originality may be distinguishbe sure, instead of forming any hy-ed as proceeding from a too indiscriminate is to account for the fact, we may, ing James's wise man, deny the fact ther. That universal cold-waterer, the London Spectator, thinks that ilnes has not shown after all that viewers did not kill Keats. It is but ble to suppose that the Spectator not read these letters carefully. was annoyed and angry at the re; but his annoyance and anger, so his correspondence can be taken for were less than most persons' would been under the circumstances. True, ked of fighting Blackwood--but did ron want to fight Southey, and that "Although this foretaste of fame is in most ng after his reputation as a poet was cases a delusion, (as the fame itself may be a greater delusion still,) yet it is the best and purest and it might have been reasonably drop in the cup of intellectual ambition. It is ensed that nothing in the way of re-joyed, thank God, by thousands who soon learn g could affect him at all? This to estimate their own capacities aright and belligerency shows that Keats was tranquilly submit to the obscure and transitory e man to die of a reviewer's lead, in condition of their existence: it is felt by many y commonly believed, at least. At who look back on it in after years with a smilher time doubtless the adverse criti- ing pity to think they were so deceived, but who nevertheless recognize in that aspiration would have annoyed Keats more, for the spring of their future energies and usefulI not the vanity of pretending to deness in other and far different fields of action; riticism; but to one consumed by the and the few in whom the prophecy is accoming passion that then held possession plished, who become what they have believed, reverence for a great but unequal model." He was then a surgeon's apprentice : whether his wishes had at all been consulted in this does not appear. Charles Cowden, Clarke and Matthew Felton were his most intimate friends. Before long he began to feel "the delightful complacency of conscious genius"-that glorious anticipation so much oftener felt than realized. On this pleasant conceit-too frequently, but not in this case a mere conceit-Milnes' remarks strike us as peculiarly just and elegant : will often turn away with uneasy satiety from present satisfaction to the memory of those happy hopes, to the thought of the dear delight they then derived from one single leaf of those laureis that now crowd in at the window, and which the hand is half inclined to push away to let in the fresh air of heaven." On completing his apprenticeship and removing to London for the purpose of walking the hospitals, Keats made the acquaintance of Leigh Hunt, who afterwards atoned, by embalming him in honeyed words, for the involuntary injury he then did him by the bad model which his style presented to the young poet. In 1817 was published Keats's first volume, containing the Epistles and some other short pieces. “At the completion of the matter for this first volume he gave a striking proof of his facility in composition; he was engaged with a lively circle of friends when the last proof-sheet was brought in, and he was requested by the printer to send the dedication directly, if he intended to have one: he went to a side-table, and while all around were noisily conversing, he sat down and wrote the sonnet, he had expended some of his most val... And now we begin to arrive at the kt- 'Glory and loveliness have passed away,' &c., which, but for the insertion of one epithet of doubtful taste, is excellent in itself, and curious as showing how he had already possessed himself of the images of pagan beauty, and was either mourning over their decay and extinction, or attempting in his own way to bid them [Keats's Criticism on West.] live again. For in him was realized the medi- day evening with Wells, and wort nex æval legend of the Venus worshipper, without ing to see Death on the Pale Horse, its melancholy moral; and while the old gods wonderful picture when West's age is : rewarded him for his love with powers and per-sidered, but there is nothing to be in enceptions that a Greek might have envied, he kept no women one feels mad to kiss, no tiem his affections high and pure above those sen- ing into reality. The excellence of e suous influences, and led a temperate and is its intensity, capable of making all e honest life, in an ideal world that knows ables evaporate from their being in c nothing of duty and repels all images that do tionship with beauty and truth. F not please." King Lear and you will find this ex. pleasantness without any mouent ves utta throughout; but in this picture we bu speculation excited in which to bury its siveness." The little book was published by Ollier "out of sheer admiration." The public took no notice of it, for which poor Ollier was blamed by the disappointed authora warning to publishers, which perhaps This is somewhat milder ti another poet-one Peter Purda * As when he asked in reference 1 the usual habits of the trade do not render man dust-hole into which we can F When it shall please the Lord Fashionable Wits.] "I dined with Haydon Sunday after you left, and had a very sant day. I dined, too, (for I have been too much lately,) with Horace Smith, and his two brothers, with Hill and Kingston, one Du Bois. They only served to cone me how superior humor is to wit, in ret of enjoyment. These men say things h make you start without making you feel; are all alike; their manners are alike; all know fashionables; they have all a nerism in their very eating and drinking, heir mere handling a decanter. They d of Kean and his low company.' uld I were with that company instead of s!' said I to myself." What the "Kirk-men" have done for Scot"These Kirk-men have done Scotland They have made men, women, old men, g men, old women, young women, boys, , and all infants, careful; so that they are ed into regular phalanges of savers and ers. Such a thrifty army cannot fail to th their country, and give it a greater apance of comfort than that of their poor neighborhood. These Kirk-men have done land harm: they have banished puns, love aughing. To remind you of the fate of s-poor unfortunate fellow! his disposiwas southern. How sad it is when a luxuimagination is obliged, in self-defence, to en its delicacy in vulgarity and in things nable, that it may not have leisure to go after things that are not! No man in matters will be content with the expee of others. It is true that out of sufferthere is no dignity, no greatness, that in most abstracted pleasure there is no lasting ness. Yet who would not like to discover again that Cleopatra was a gipsey, Helen -ue, and Ruth a deep one?" 66 Teats Romantic.] "I have been very roic indeed among these mountains and . I have got wet through day after day; oat-cake and drank whiskey; walked up knees in bog; got a sore throat; gone to colmkill and Staffa; met with unwholefood, just here and there as it happened; up Ben-Nevis, and-N. B., came down ; sometimes when I am rather tired, I anguishingly on a rock, and long for some is beauty to get down from her palfrey in ng, approach me with-her saddle-bags, give me a dozen or two capital roast-beef viches." w Keats came to appear a Misogynist.] certain that our fair are glad I should for the mere sake of my coming; but I rtain I bring with me a vexation they are without. If I can possibly, at any time, feel my temper coming upon me, I refrain even from a promised visit. I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women--at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a school-boy i thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to expect more than the reality. I thought them ethereal, above men. I find them perhaps equal--great by comparison is very small. Insult may be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of being insulted does not like to think an insult against another. I do not like to think insults in a lady's company. I commit a crime with her that absence would not have known. Is it not extraordinary? When among men, I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; I can listen, and from every one I can learn; my hands are in my pockets, I am free from all suspicion and comfortable. When I am among women, I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone. You must be charitable, and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since my boyhood. Yet with such feelings, I am happier alone, among crowds of men, by myself, or with a friend or two; with all this, trust me, I have not the least idea that men of different feelings and inclinations are more shortsighted than myself. I never rejoiced more than at my brother's marriage, and shall do so at that of any of my friends. I must absolutely get over this-but how? the only way is to find the root of the evil, and so cure it with backward matters of dissevering power.' That is a difficult thing; for an obstinate prejudice can seldom be produced but from a Gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to unravel, and care to keep unravelled. I could say a good deal about this, but I will leave it, in hopes of better and more worthy dispositions-and also, content that I am wronging no one, for, after all, I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats, five feet high, likes them or not." ཙ A lady thus describes Keats as he appeared attending Hazlitt's lectures in the winter of 1818: "His eyes were large and blue, his hair auburn; he wore it divided down the centre, and it fell in rich masses on each side of his face; his mouth was full, and less intellectual than his other features. His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness. It had an expression as if had been looking on some glorious sight. The shape of his face had not the squareness of a man's, but more like some women's faces I have seen-it was so wide over the forehead and so small at the chin." The next summer he made a pedestrian tour to the Highlands with his friend Brown. The same season Endymion was published-the poem which elicited that which elicited that abuse of the Tory reviewers. We think it was really a waste of time in Milnes to tell us that this abuse was "dull" and "ungenerous" and "scurrilous." The whole case lies in a nutshell. Keats was a Liberal; the reviewers were Tories; the Tory writers made it a principle to caricature and vilify all liberal authors. It is positively awful to contemplate the violence of the political prejudice which at that day infected English literature; and to us Americans it is the more striking because no similar state of things has ever existed among ourselves. Most honorable is it, and a most fit subject of national pride, that in no one instance have the political opinions of an American author affected the decision of American critics. | quicksands and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and played a silly pre and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would rather fa.. than not be among the greatest." [The Lady.] She is not a Cleopatra, but at least a Charmian; she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes, and fine manners. When she comes into the room, she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself, to repulse any man who may address her: from habit she thinks that nothing particviar. I always find myself at ease with such a woman. the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am, at such times, toc much occupied in admiring to be awkward, or in a tremble: I forget myself entirely, because am in love with her, so before I go any farther I live in her. You will by this time think! I will tell you I am not. She kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper thr a conversation with an imperial woulan, the very 'yes' and no' of whose life is to me a l with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave i banquet. I don't cry to take the moon be her behind me. I like her and her like, b cause one has no sensation; what we both an is taken for granted. You will suppose. have, by this, had much talk with her-no sukt thing; there are the Misses — on the loa out. They think I don't admire her beca don't stare at her; they call her a flirt to te what a want of knowledge! She walks BCTUR the room in such a manner, that a drawn towards her with magrele p this they call flirting! They do not cos things; they do not know what a wet ata believe, though she has faults, the same as Læs patra and Charmian might have had.” [Another Lady.] "Your mother and I 1277 had some talk about Miss S. [How Keats took the Reviews.] "I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part. As for the rest, I begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness. 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 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 Will Henry have that Miss a athe what is fine. J. S. is perfectly right about the boddice, she who has been fine-drawn, se ar Slip-shod Endymion.' That it is so, is no nothing but to be cut up into cri fault of mine. No! though it may sound a one who is all muslin ; all feathers and little paradoxical, it is as good as I had power Once in travelling she was made use to make it by myself. Had I been nervous linch-pin. I hope he will not have her, t about its being a perfect piece, and with that it is no uncommon thing to be subview asked advice and trembled over every staff-though she might be usefu as is page, it would not have been written. I will ing-stick, his fishing-rod, his tooding write independently. I have written inde-hat-stick, (she runs so much in his in set pendently without judgment. I may write in him turn farmer, she would eat at dependently, and with judgment hereafter. let him write poetry, she would be The Genius of Poetry must work out its own style. Her gown is like a flag on a ja salvation in a man. It cannot be matured by would do for him if he turn iret.aum law and precept, but by sensation and watch- hope she will prove a flag of truce fulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself. In 'Endymion' 1 leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the [Keats likes Bordeaux.) “I bevera three glasses of wine, and never att and water, though by the by, the Woodhouse took me to his coffee-8 2 ered a bottle of claret. How I like claret! en I can get claret, I must drink it. "Tis only palate affair I am at all sensual in. ould it not be a good spec, to send you some e-roots? [to America.] Could it be done? inquire. If you could make some wine eclaret to drink of summer evenings in an or! It fills one's mouth with gushing freshss, then goes down cool and feverless; then u do not feel it quarrelling with your liver. 'tis rather a peace-maker, and lies as quiet it did in the grape. Then it is as fragrant the Queen Bee, and the more ethereal part it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the rebral apartments, like a bully looking for trull, and hurrying from door to door, ancing against the wainscot, but rather walks e Aladdin about his enchanted palace, so ntly that you do not feel his step. Other nes of a heavy and spirituous nature transm man into a Silenus; his makes him a ermes, and gives a woman the soul and imortality of an Ariadne, for whom Bacchus rays kept a good cellar of claret, and even that he could never persuade her to take above o cups." During the next year, besides writing impracticable tragedy in partnership ith his friend Mr. Brown, Keats achieved is really great poems, Lamia, St. Agnes' ve, and the fragment Hyperion. The uperb "Ode to a Nightingale" had a arrow escape, in this wise: | "Shorter poems were scrawled, as they hapened to suggest themselves, on the first scrap I paper at hand, which was afterwards used s a mark for a book, or thrown anywhere side." It seemed as if, when his imagination as once relieved by writing down its ffusions, he cared so little about them, hat it required a friend at hand to preent them from being utterly lost. Acordingly, when a lucky bird had inspired im one spring day after breakfast, the reults of his reverie were thrown away as mere waste-paper, and his vigilant host ad no small difficulty in collecting and rranging the scattered stanzas. Here is one of the Lamb-like passages we alluded to: Have you any tea, or do you milk and water with them? What place of worship do you go to? The Quakers, Moravians, Unitarians, or the Methodists? Are there any flowers in bloom you like? Any streets full of corsetmakers? What sort of shoes have you to put those pretty feet of yours in? Do you desire compliments to one another? Do you ride on horseback? What do you have for breakfast, dinner and supper, without mentioning lunch and bite, and wet and snack and a bit to stay one's stomach? Do you get any spirits? Now you might easily distil some whiskey, and going into the woods set up a whiskey-shop for the monkeys! Do you and the other ladies get groggy on anything? A little so-so-ish, so as to be seen home with a lantern? You may perhaps have a game of Puss-in-the-corner; ladies are warranted to play at this game, though they have not whiskers. Have you a fiddle in the settlement, or at any rate a Jew's-harp, which will play in spite of one's teeth? When you have nothing else to do for a whole day, I'll tell you how you may employ it: first get up, and when you are dressed, as it would be pretty early, with a high wind in the woods, give George a cold pig* with my compliments, then you may saunter to the nearest coffee-house, and after taking a dram and a look at the Chronicle, go and frighten the wild boars on the strength of it. You may as well bring one home for breakfast, serving up the hoofs, garnished with bristles, and a grunt or two, to accompany the singing of the kettle. Then if George is not up, give him a colder pig, always with my compliments. After you have eaten your breakfast keep your eye upon dinner; it is the safest way; you should keep a hawk's eye over your dinner, and keep hovering over it till due time, then pounce upon it, taking care not to break any plates. While you are hovering about with your dinner in prospect, you may do a thousand things, put a hedge-hog into George's hat, pour a little water into his rifle, soak his boots in a pail of water, cut his jacket round into shreds like a Roman kilt, or the back of my grandmother's stays, tear off his buttons." Keats's health had been very uncertain for three years. In the autumn of 1820 he was evidently dying of consumption. As a last resort he went to Italy with his friend Severn, the artist, in whose arms he died five months afterwards. This, it will be observed, was more than two years after the Blackwood and Quarterly articles, a distance of time which militates still fur ther against the supposition that they were |