which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. His face was rather long than otherwise; the upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing; large, dark and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action, or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled.' In this, there was ill health as well

taken from Mr. Thornton Hunt's edition of 1860, are placed at the end in a separate group. The portrait of Keats as given in the quarto of 1828 was "engraved by Henry Meyer after a sketch drawn from life by Severn." Mr. Severn wrote to me some years ago that he considered the Meyer print (executed though it was in a very charming way) to be "a caricature of Keats"; and, as it varies in some essential points from the beautiful original, a charcoal drawing now in the Forster Collection at the South Kensington Museum, I have had a fac-simile produced by the photo-intaglio process, the frontispiece to Volume II.

1 At this point it will be interesting to insert, more especially on account of the reminiscence at the close, the following passage from the Life and Letters (1867), page 12:-"Mr. Felton Mathew, to whom his first published Epistle was addressed, had introduced him to agreeable society, both of books and men, and those verses were written just at the time when Keats became fully aware that he had no real interest in the profession he was sedulously pursuing, and was already in the midst of that sad conflict between the outer and inner worlds, which is too often, perhaps in some degree always, the Poet's heritage in life. That freedom from the bonds of conventional phraseology which so clearly designates true genius, but which, if unwatched and unchastened, will continually outrage the perfect form that can alone embalm the beautiful idea and preserve it for ever, is there already manifest, and the presence of Spenser shows itself not only by quaint expressions and curious adaptations of rhyme, but by the introduction of the words 'and make a sunshine in a shady place,' applied to the power of the Muse. Mr. Mathew retains his impression that at that time 'the eye of Keats was more critical than tender, and so was his mind: he admired more the external decorations than felt the deep emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the pathetic. He used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never

as imagination, for he did not like these betrayals of emotion; and he had great personal as well as moral courage. [He once chastised a butcher, who had been insolent, by a regular stand-up fight.'] His hair, of a brown colour, was fine, and hung in natural ringlets. The head was a puzzle for the phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull; a singularity which he had in common with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get on. Keats was sensible of the disproportion above noticed, between his upper and lower extremities; and he would look at his hand, which was faded, and swollen in the veins, and say it was the hand of a man of fifty. He was a seven month's child: his mother, who was a lively woman, passionately fond of amusement, is supposed to have hastened her death by too great an inattention to hours and seasons. Perhaps she hastened that of her son. His father died of a fall from his horse in the year 1804.3

2

observed the tears in his eyes nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme sensibility.' This modification of early sensibility by the growing preponderance of the imagination is a frequent phenomenon in poetical pyschology."

1 See the account of this in Clarke's Recollections.

2 This is not quite a fair suggestion. If this sort of thing is to be taken into account in a quasi-scientific manner, let us confess frankly that we know so little of the conditions which give rise to or foster genius that, supposing certain antenatal conditions to have cut short Keats's life, we cannot say what bearing those same conditions had upon his genius. If we do not know whether Mrs. Keats's imprudence resulted in a short-lived progeny, we are equally ignorant whether a longer-lived one more normally brought into the world might not have lacked the very genius which has made the world deplore the poet's early death.

"Here is the account of the accident published at the time in The Gentleman's Magazine under the head of deaths :-" [April] 15. Mr. Keats, livery-stable-keeper in Moorfields. He went to dine at Southgate; returned at a late hour, and, on passing down

Keats's origin was of the humblest description; he was born October 29, 1796, at a livery-stables in Moorfields, of which his grandfather was the proprietor.1 I am very incurious, and did not know this till the other day. He never spoke of it, perhaps out of a personal soreness which the world had exasperated. After receiving the rudiments of a classical education at Mr. Clarke's school at Enfield, he was bound apprentice to Mr. Hammond, a surgeon, in Church-street, Edmonton; and his enemies

the City road, his horse fell with him, when he had the misfortune to fracture his skull. It was about one o'clock in the morning when the watchman found him; he was then alive, but speechless; the watchman got assistance, and took him to a house in the neighbourhood, where he died about eight o'clock [on the morning of the 16th of April 1804]."

1 Both as to origin and as to date some qualification is here necessary. Clarke's Recollections furnish a correction; but by way of foot-note the following passage from the Life and Letters is appropriate here as putting the matter on a more proper footing:

"The interest which attaches to the family of every remarkable individual has failed to discover in that of Keats anything more than that the influences with which his childhood was surrounded were virtuous and honourable. His father, who was employed in the establishment of Mr. Jennings, a proprietor of large liverystables on the Pavement in Moorfields, nearly opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus, became his master's son-in-law, and is still remembered as a man of excellent natural sense, lively and energetic countenance, and entire freedom from any vulgarity or assumption on account of his prosperous alliance. He was killed by a fall from his horse in 1804, at the early age of thirty-six. The mother, a lively intelligent woman, was supposed to have prematurely hastened the birth of John by her passionate love of amusement, though his constitution gave no signs of the peculiar debility of a seventh months child. He was born on the 29th of October, 1795. This point, which has been disputed, (Mr. Leigh Hunt making him a year younger,) is decided by the proceedings in Chancery, on the administration of his effects, where he is said to have come of age in October, 1816. Rawlings v. Jennings, June 3rd, 1825."

having made a jest even of this, he did not like to be reminded of it; at once disdaining them for their meanness, and himself for being sick enough to be moved by them. Mr. Clarke, junior, his schoolmaster's son, a reader of genuine discernment, had encouraged with great warmth the genius that he saw in the young poet; and it was to Mr. Clarke I was indebted for my acquaintance with him. I shall never forget the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet's heart as warm as his imagination. We read and walked together, and used to write verses of an evening upon a given subject. No imaginative pleasure was left unnoticed by us, or unenjoyed; from the recollection of the bards and patriots of old, to the luxury of a summer rain at our window, or the clicking of the coal in winter-time. Not long afterwards, having the pleasure of entertaining at dinner Godwin, Hazlitt, and Basil Montague, I showed them the verses of my young friend, and they were pronounced to be as extraordinary as I thought them. One of them was that noble sonnet on first reading Chapman's Homer, which terminates with so energetic a calmness, and which completely announced the new poet taking possession. As Keats's first juvenile volume is not much known, I will repeat the sonnet here,' as a remarkable instance of a vein prematurely masculine.

Modern criticism has made the public well acquainted with the merits of Chapman. The retainers of some schools of poetry may not see very far into his old oracular

style; but the poets themselves (the true test of poetical merit) have always felt the impression. Waller professed that he could never read him without a movement of transport; and Pope, in the preface to his translation, says that he was animated by a daring fiery spirit, something like what we may conceive of Homer himself "before he arrived at years of discretion." Chapman certainly stands upon no ceremony. He blows as rough a blast as Achilles could have desired to hear, very different from the soft music of a parade. "The whales exult" under his Neptune, playing unwieldy gambols; and his Ulysses issues out of the shipwreck, "soaked to the very heart;" tasting of sea-weeds and salt-water, in a style that does not at all mince the matter, or consult the proprieties of Brighton. Keats's epithets of "loud and bold," showed that he understood him thoroughly. The men of Cortez staring at each other, and the eagle eyes of their leader looking out upon the Pacific, have been thought too violent a picture for the dignity of the occasion; but it is a case that requires the exception. Cortez's "eagle eyes" are a piece of historical painting, as the reader may see by Titian's portrait of him. The last line,

"Silent-upon a peak in Darien,"

makes the mountain a part of the spectacle, and supports the emotion of the rest of the sonnet upon a basis of gigantic tranquillity.

The volume containing this sonnet was published in 1817, when the author was in his twenty-first year.' The poem with which it begins, was suggested to him by

1 According to the clear evidence produced by Lord Houghton as to the date of Keats's birth (page 276), we must here read twenty-second for twenty-first.