King Stephen. John Keats Novr 1819 while the verso bears the following list of Dramatis Personæ. King Stephen. Duke of Glocester Earl of Chester. Earl Baldwin. The Empress Maud, or Matilda. In Keats's text, however, Glocester is the Earl of Glocester. So far as Scene I is concerned, Brown's transcript corresponds with the published text save in line 35, where he reads "Not twenty Earl of Chesters." From the appearance of this manuscript it would seem that, in November 1819, to throw off poetic utterances in the finest and freest style was as easy to Keats as the breathing of his native air. Between the times at which the LIBRARY editions and the COMPLETE edition appeared I obtained what is, as far as I am aware, the only known authority for the Sonnet beginning Before he went to feed with owls and bats. This was preserved by Henry Stephens in a little manuscript volume consisting of Keats's published Poems of 1817 copied out with the addition of eight fugitive pieces of which this Sonnet alone was still unpublished when the little volume, written by Stephens in 1828, came into my hands. The Sonnet is doubtless authentic, although poor, obscure, and possibly corrupt in the last line. It was during the same interval that I had an opportunity of examining a holograph manuscript of The Cap and Bells, wanting stanzas ix to xvi and lxxxii to lxxxviii. I think it possible that Keats got it out to work on it, after throwing it aside-for on the margin of one of its pages is written the clearly late fragment (page 486) beginning This living hand, now warm and capable; 29.66 warn but he may have had it in his hand again merely to lend to Hunt for The Indicator, in which a few stanzas were printed. The variations and rejected readings recorded in my foot-notes are of course from this manuscript. It is written with unusual inaccuracy: the first stanza, for example, shows the forms "sleight" for "slight," "woing" for "wooing,' " for "warm," and "smoth" for "smooth." Errors of this kind are not recorded as a rule in the notes to this poem in the COMPLETE edition, where however the results of a scrupulous examination of the holograph are given. This manuscript was sold by auction on the 5th of June 1902; and I examined it again: it had been further mutilated since my previous examination, as I pointed out in The Athenæum for the 14th of June: the sheet containing the latter part of stanza xlv, stanzas xlvi to li, and, I believe, the fragment "This living hand," had been removed in the interim; but who now owns either that sheet or the rest of the manuscript, I cannot say. Up to the time when the COMPLETE Keats was published, no holograph manuscript of Hyperion had yet come to light; but Woodhouse had had one copied into his Common-place book before it was revised finally for the impression of 1820, and had marked or got marked in pencil some of the subsequent omissions and alterations. The transcript was made in what one would feel confident in describing as the writing of a lawyer's young clerk (Woodhouse was a lawyer): it is very carefully made, and, I did not doubt, preserved much of Keats's spelling, punctuation, and capitalling. It may be noted as a measure of the transcriber's education that Mnemosyne is invariably spelt Muemosyne (Keats's n's and u's being more or less indistinctive). In one case, Woodhouse found his boy out, and altered the u to an n. There is scarcely any doubt that this transcript was the "copy" sent to the printer in 1820 to set the poem up from. It has the usual indelible printing-house finger-marks, and, as touched up with the pencil, does not vary from the printed book in a greater degree than would be likely, if we allow for the usual amount of printing-house punctuation and a rot undue revision of proofs by the author. The rest of the Common-place book was kept clean and secret while Hyperion was thus "at press," by some arrangement of sealing up; for the remains of the sealing-wax are still there on the pages before and after Hyperion. Since the COMPLETE Keats was published very little unknown poetry by Keats has come to light, and none of any consequence except a suppressed passage of The Fall of Hyperion and a passage of The Eve of St. Mark, to be mentioned presently. Of Hyperion as published by Keats, however, the holograph manuscript, almost complete, has been recovered and added to the British Museum collection; and a further examination of Lord Houghton's papers by the Earl of Crewe has revealed the presence of a transcript of The Fall of Hyperion, made by Woodhouse's clerks and corrected by Woodhouse himself. The recovery of these two documents -the holograph of Hyperion and the Woodhouse transcript of The Fall of Hyperion-formed together an event of capital importance in relation to the text of Keats's works; and that event was signalized by the issue of a large folio volume from the CLARENDON PRESS, under the editorship of Mr. Ernest de Sélincourt. The volume contained a fac-simile of the holograph and a print of the Woodhouse copy of The Fall, together with admirable introductions and notes by the editor. In the meantime, on the 13th of May 1901, some Keats manuscripts were disposed of in the autograph collection of the late Townely Green. The Keats items included (1) a holograph copy of the Sonnet on first looking into Chapman's Homer, headed in another hand "To Mariane Reynolds," and catalogued as "Autograph Verses to Marianne Reynolds" [sic; but her name was really Mariane with one n only], (2) the draft of the Nightingale Ode now in the HOUGHTONCREWE collection, headed "Ode to the Nightingale,” not "a Nightingale," (3) a beautiful copy on quarto paper of the Ode to Psyche, and (4) a rough sheet of note-paper bearing fair copies of the lines "Unfelt, unheard, unseen," and the Hymn to Apollo. All of these manuscripts I examined carefully: by far the most important was the Nightingale draft, fully described by Professor Sidney Colvin in No. 30 of The Monthly Review (March 1903), which contains a fac-simile of the manuscript. With special reference to this important lyric, Benjamin Robert Haydon, in one of his letters to Miss Mitford (Correspondence &c., Volume II, page 72), says of Keats-"The death of his brother wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour he began to droop. He wrote his exquisite Ode to the Nightingale at this time, and as we were one evening walking in the Kilburn meadows he repeated it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous under-tone which affected me extremely." Lord Houghton says the Ode was suggested by the continued song of a nightingale which, in the spring of 1819, had built its nest close to Wentworth Place. "Keats," says the biographer (ALDINE edition, 1876, page 237), "took great pleasure in her song, and one morning took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he remained between two and three hours. He then reached the house with some scraps of paper in his hand, which he soon put together in the form of this Ode." The anecdote as told in the Life, Letters, &c. (Volume I, page 245 of the 1848 edition, and page 207 of the 1867 edition) represents Brown as detecting the poet in the act of thrusting the scraps of the Ode away 66 as waste paper, behind some books," and names Brown as the person who put them together. I presume Lord Houghton thought afterwards that Brown must have mistaken the bearing of Keats's action, inasmuch as the other evidence does not square with the carelessness implied. It is well to put the two forms of the story together, because the earliest version is still a favourite "literary anecdote," and the HOUGHTON-CREWE draft does not appear to me to dispose finally of the question. This draft clearly shows Keats in the act of composition-or recomposition; but I do not think Professor Colvin proves conclusively that those two leaves were the very scraps Brown saw Keats bring in and hide. It is quite conceivable that the poet, after hiding-perhaps forgetting where he hid—the scraps, found himself in the mood to give one of the Reynoldses a copy of the ode, sat down, and recomposed it, mainly, of course, from memory. In December 1903, Messrs. H. Sotheran & Co., of 37 Piccadilly, lent me for collation a beautiful holograph manuscript of lines 1 to 96 of the poem beginning I stood tip-toe upon a little hill, the complement, no doubt, of the manuscript in the ROWFANT Collection with which I had previously collated the poem from line 97 to the end. At the same time they lent me a holograph manuscript of the sonnet On leaving some Friends at an early Hour, on the back of which were some lines of or connected with "I stood tip-toe," and, further, a holograph of the stanzas To some Ladies (pages 15-16 of this edition). It was from the Woodhouse section of the HOUGHTONCREWE papers that Mr. de Sélincourt was enabled to give for the first time the trifle of 1814, "Fill for me a brimming bowl" (pages 283-4 of this edition), and the early sonnet on Peace (page 284); for at the end of The Fall of Hyperion Woodhouse's clerks had copied for him a small collection of minor poems mostly long familiar to Keats's readers, but including one or two |