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 a wide one, but he held to worthy traditions, and it was 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 stimulation 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 pay for his loyalty to a man who had braved Tory opinion and who passed if not posed as a martyr of Tory oppression.

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

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

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 was forced to trust for inspiration and material not to original classic sources but to classical dictionaries and his own invention. To the ancient myth he owed little beyond the central idea of the passion of the goddess for a mortal. With

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 criticism 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. anxious," he wrote while the book was in the press, Endymion printed, that I may forget it and proceed."

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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.

Domestic troubles were meanwhile thickening about the poet. His affection for his family was intense, as indeed were all his feelings; and from this he was destined to receive more of sorrow than of joy. The guardian of his sister Fanny, regarding the poet with the outraged propriety of the British Philistine who has seen a respectable profession thrust aside to give place for so doubtful an occupation as verse-making, discouraged if he did not actually endeavor to prevent all intimacy between his ward and her brother. George, the second of the Keats children, married and emigrated to America in the spring of 1818. The third brother, Tom, whom John loved very tenderly, was dying of consumption; and the poet was undoubtedly weakened by the devotion with which he nursed the invalid. The death of Tom in the autumn of 1818 was a blow so terrible that its effects were not to be shaken off, coming as it did at a time when disease, loneliness and discouragement had lessened Keats's vitality and weakened his power of resistance.

It might have seemed, indeed, that there was consolation in the fact that during this same autumn Keats became engaged to Miss Fanny Brawne, for whom he conceived a passion which was characteristic of his ardent nature; but in the event there proved to be for him in this love more of torment than of joy. Through the melancholy weeks of his rapidly increasing illness in the year following, he wrote to her a series of letters marked with mad love, despairing desire, ever increasing misery and morbid frenzy born of the passionate consciousness that the bony fingers of death were already clutching his wrist to lead him away from all his ambitions and from his love. The publication of these letters in our own day by those who profess to admire the genius and to cherish the memory of Keats, was an outrage incomparably greater than any attack made upon the poet in his lifetime by hostile reviewers. They prove, however,

how much more of anguish than of bliss came to him through this passion.

In this year, 1818, besides the beginning of Hyperion, Isabella and the Eve of St. Agnes were written. Lamia and the great odes belong to the year following. Keats also produced with his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, a blankverse tragedy, called Otho the Great, Brown furnishing the story and Keats the verse. There was at one time a prospect that this might be acted, and Keats, hoping to find in dramatic literature a means of livelihood, began alone a tragedy on the life of King Stephen, which he soon abandoned unfinished.

In the autumn of 1819 Keats took lodgings in London, declaring his intention of writing for the periodicals for support. His means were nearly exhausted, his health was steadily failing, and he was worn out alike by the sense of the desperate struggle in which his life was involved and by a burning desire to regain strength and means which would allow him to marry. He attempted a recast of Hyperion, but with a result so little satisfactory that for a long time the later version was believed to be an earlier attempt than the original. He also wrote part of what was to be a comic fairy poem, somewhat in the style of Ariosto. It was called Cap and Bells; or, Jealousies, and was to be published over the name Lucy Vaughn Lloyd. There are a few scattered touches of the real Keats in it, but on the whole perhaps nothing more need be said of it than that it is better forgotten as the unworthy product of a brain sick and distraught.

In February Keats received a chill by riding on the outside of a stage-coach, and this was followed by a hemorrhage. The incident, as told by his friend Brown, is movingly pathetic.

"I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed,