his employer. He seems to have been a respectable, sensible man, of instincts more refined than are usually found in his station. The mother's character has not been very clearly set forth. She is said to have been of disposition somewhat saturnine, and fond of amusements. The latter trait is of immediate interest from the fact that it is supposed to have led to some imprudence which resulted in the premature entrance into the world of her eldest son. The child was born at Moorfields, London, on October 29 or 31, 1795, and was christened John.

Three other children were born to Mr. and Mrs. Keats, two boys, George and Thomas, and a daughter, Fanny. The father was killed by a fall from his horse in 1804, and the mother died of consumption in 1810. John was strongly attached to his mother, and felt her death keenly. His nature, too, was not one to be lightly consoled, although he was outwardly of a disposition rather joyous than melancholy.

The boy had been early put to school at Enfield, under a Mr. Clarke, who is best remembered as the schoolmaster of Keats and the father of Charles Cowden Clarke, the Shakespearean scholar. Here he received a fair rudimentary education, including some knowledge of Latin. Greek he never knew. He seems to have been well liked by his fellows, and between him and the son of the master sprang up a friendship which lasted through the short life of the poet. Keats as a schoolboy was a manly, passionate cious lad, of quick and lively temperament, and th rather small stature, of much personal beauty of f figure. The maternal grandfather had left a 1 fortune to the Keats children, which was not too w aged by the trustees. A considerable portion of share was expended upon his education. He w from school at fifteen, and apprenticed for five

no

d

surgeon, although for some reason not clear he did not complete this term. He then went into the London hospitals, and reached the point of being able to operate successfully. While his education had been progressing, however, the poetic strain had shown itself in the young man. He was

of his life poetry

It was not until

not precociously literary. The reading of Spenser when he was sixteen or seventeen seems to have awakened in him the passion till then latent, and for the rest was to him a prime necessity of existence. a couple of years later1 that he ventured to show to Clarke his own attempts at rhyming; but he composed more and more, and more and more the love of poetic composition grew upon him. "The other day, during the lecture,” he once said to Clarke, "there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland." The combined result of his inclination toward literature and of the sensitiveness which made surgery intolerable to him was that in the winter of 1816-17 Keats formed definitely the determination to devote his life to poetry.

Keats had in the meantime through Clarke made that acquaintance with Leigh Hunt and his coterie which was to influence so strongly his work and his fate. Leigh Hunt was an amiable, attractive, superficially accomplished creature; an engaging dilettante in politics, in literature and in life. He was staunch in his friendships and appreciative the work of others in an entirely unenvious fashion. He with his brother a paper called the Examiner, in ON F political matters were discussed with more emotion DEDICA ofundity, but which had at least the merit of fearless WRITTESS. An attack upon the Prince Regent, which was

SONG

LA B

How Me is more or less confusion of the authorities in regard to these "KEEN, the matter is not of importance which warrants going into it To G. A.

distinguished as much by violence as it was for truth, procured for Hunt the penalties of fine and imprisonment; and it is hardly too much to say that he made more reputation out of his imprisonment than out of his talents.

Keats was greatly influenced by Hunt, whose authority in matters literary and æsthetic the young man not unnaturally exaggerated; and perhaps this influence was not on the whole other than beneficial.

The range of Hunt was never
worthy traditions, and it was

a wide one, but he held to
of no little importance that Keats was brought into an
atmosphere essentially and avowedly intellectual. The direct
literary influence of Hunt, Keats lived long enough almost
entirely to outgrow; while the indirect effects in the stimu-
lation of a passion for poetry and a respect for classic
models must have been of value however long the poet had
lived.

The outward effect of this association with the coterie scornfully dubbed by Blackwood's the "Cockney School" was disastrous. It brought upon the head of Keats the wrath of the Tory reviewers, at a time when criticism was more a matter of politics than of literature and when decencies of expression were as little regarded as were canons of art. Keats wrote a sonnet to Hunt on the latter's release from his political imprisonment, and dedicated to him his first volume of poems. This first volume, issued in 1817, was too insignificant to attract even abuse, despite the fact that it contained the superb Chapman's Homer sonnet; but when Endymion appeared in the year following, Keats was made to for pay his loyalty to a man who had braved Tory opinion and whe passed if not posed as a martyr of Tory oppres

The first volume contained not much of note b sonnet just mentioned, I Stood Tiptoe upon a Little Sleep and Poetry. There were epistles to Keats's b Clarke and other friends, with a set of feeble verses

nd the

Fill, and

thers, to

yel,

eto some

vxix

ladies who had sent the poet a shell; and there were a number of sonnets, for the most part of rather indifferent merit. The epistles showed most plainly the influence of Hunt in their tendency to familiar and colloquial commonplaces and occasionally to clumsy jocoseness; but even at this early stage of his art life, the instincts of Keats's own genius were too true for him to fall deeply into these errors.

No sooner was this first volume launched than Keats began upon Endymion. His health was already causing his friends anxiety, and at their advice he went to the Isle of Wight. This he found too lonely, and soon left for Margate and Canterbury; thence he went to Hampstead, where he passed the summer. It was at this time that he said in one of his letters:

It is said that he had agreed with Shelley, whom he had met at Hunt's, that each should write a poem in six months. Shelley wrote The Revolt of Islam by way of keeping this compact, while Keats produced Endymion. The poem was begun in April, 1817, and finished in first draft in the November following. The opening book was ready for the printer in January. The story of the loves of Diana and her shepherd had long been in Keats's mind, and in I Stood Tiptoe upon a Little Hill he had already shown the vivid impression made upon him by the legend which he now used. As has been said, he did not read Greek, and he therefore as forced to trust for inspiration and material not to original lassic sources but to classical dictionaries and his own vention. To the ancient myth he owed little beyond the ntral idea of the passion of the goddess for a mortal. With To G

this he interwove according to his fancy fragments of other Grecian myths and incidents of his own devising, the result being a web of mingled obvious faults and exquisite beauties.

The weaknesses of the work were sufficiently numerous and evident to give bitter point and force to the virulent attacks with which Endymion was met by the Tory press. Keats now paid in full for his association with Leigh Hunt and the "Cockney School." Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review assailed the book with so much venom that for many years it was generally believed that the critiIcism in the latter killed Keats. This was long ago disproved. It is known now that the poet was death-doomed by hereditary disease before Endymion saw the light, and that, so far from being crushed by the reviews, he received them with rare good sense and manliness; but the theory that the Quarterly killed him will always be remembered from its vigorous enshrinement by Shelley in Adonais.

The swiftness of the poetic development of the young singer is indicated by the effect of Endymion upon him, and by his own attitude toward the book. He wrote it with eagerness, and yet by the time it was finished he had already outgrown it. In the preface he says in effect that while he perceives the defects of the work, he has already passed so completely beyond it that he cannot rewrite. "I am anxious," he wrote while the book was in the press, "to get Endymion printed, that I may forget it and proceed."

In the preface to Endymion Keats announced his intention of trying one more Grecian story, and in the following December he began Hyperion. The majestic dignity of the opening passage is in itself a sufficient proof of the amazing rapidity of his poetic growth. He worked at the epic at intervals for nearly a year, but in the end wisely abandoned it, convinced of the impossibility of reviving with true vitality the story of the early gods.