George himself hoped to superintend and supply materials for a life of his brother, but partly his want of literary experience, and partly the difficulty of leaving his occupations in the West, prevented him. Mr. Taylor, the publisher, also at one time wished to be Keats's biographer, and with the help of Woodhouse collected materials for the purpose, but in the end failed to use them. The same wish was entertained by John Hamilton Reynolds, whose literary skill and fine judgment and delicacy should have made him, of all the poet's friends, the most competent for the work. But of these many projects not one had been carried out when, five-and-twenty years after Keats's death, a younger man, who had never seen him, took up the taskthe Monckton Milnes of those days, the Lord Houghton freshly remembered by us all-and with help from nearly all Keats's surviving friends, and by the grace of his own genial and sympathetic temper, set the memory of the poet in its true light in the beautiful and moving book with which every student is familiar.

Keats had, indeed, enemies within his house, apart (if the separation can with truth be made) from the secret presence of that worst enemy of all, inherited disease, which killed him. He had a nature all tingling with pride and sensitiveness; he had the perilous capacity and appetite for pleasure to which he owns when he speaks of his own "exquisite sense of the luxurious;" and with it the besetting tendency to self- torment which he describes as his "horrid morbidity of temperament." The greater his credit that on the one hand he gave way so little to selfindulgence, and that, on the other, he battled so bravely with the spirits that plagued him. To the bridle thus put on himself he alludes in his unaffected way when he speaks of the "violence of his temperament, continually smoth

ered up." Left fatherless at eight, motherless at fifteen, and subject, during the forming years of his life which followed, to no other discipline but that of apprenticeship in he showed in his life such generossuburban a surgery, ity, modesty, humour, and self-knowledge, such a spirit of conduct and degree of self-control, as would have done honour to one infinitely better trained and less hardly tried. His hold over himself gave way, indeed, under the stress of passion, and as a lover he betrays all the weak places of his nature. But we must remember his state of health when the passion seized, and the worse state into which it quickly threw, him, as well as the lack there was in her who caused it-not, indeed, so far as we can judge, of kindness and loyalty, but certainly, it would seem, of the woman's finer genius of tact and tenderness. Under another kind of trial, when the work he offered to the world, in all soberness of self-judgment and of hope, was thrust back upon him with gibes and insult, he bore himself with true dignity; and if the practical consequences preyed upon his mind, it was not more than reason and the state of his fortunes justified.

In all ordinary relations of life his character was conspicuous alike for manly spirit and sweetness. No man who ever lived has inspired in his friends a deeper or more devoted affection. One, of whose name we have heard little in this history,' wrote while the poet lay dying: "Keats must get himself again, Severn, if but for me-I cannot afford to lose him; if I know what it is to love, I truly love John Keats." The following is from a letter of Brown, written also during his illness: "He is present to me everywhere and at all times-he now seems sitting here at my side, and looking hard into my face. .

1 Haslam, in Severn MSS.

3

2

So much as I have loved him, I never knew how closely he was wound about my heart." Elsewhere, speaking of the time of his first attack, Brown says: "While I waited on him, his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my of fices, by a glance of his eye or motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment. Something like this Severn, his last nurse, observed to me;" and we know in fact how the whole life of Severn, prolonged nearly sixty years after his friend's death, was coloured by the light reflected from his memory. When Lord Houghton's book came out, in 1848, Archdeacon Bailey wrote from Ceylon to thank the writer for doing merited honour to one "whose genius I did not, and do not, more fully admire than I entirely loved the Man." The points on which all who knew him especially dwell are two: First, his high good sense and spirit of honour; as to which let one witness stand for many. "He had a soul of noble integrity," says Bailey, "and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was, in the best sense, manly." Next, his beautiful unselfishness and warmth of sympathy. This is the rarest quality of genius, which from the very intensity of its own life and occupations is apt to be self-absorbed, requiting the devotion it receives with charm, which costs it nothing but with charm only-and when the trial comes, refusing to friendship any real sacrifice of its own objects or inclinations. But when genius to charm adds true unselfishness, and is ready to throw all the ardour of its own life into the cares and interests of those about it, then we have what in human nature is most worthy of love. And this is what his 2 Houghton MSS.

1 Severn MSS.

3 lbid.

1

companions found in Keats. "He was the sincerest friend," cries Reynolds, "the most lovable associate-the deepest listener to the griefs and distresses of all around him that ever lived in this tide of times." To the same effect Haydon: "He was the most unselfish of human creatures; unadapted to this world, he cared not for himself, and put himself to any inconvenience for the sake of his friends. . . . He had a kind, gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune with any one who wanted it." And again Bailey:

"With his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew than was John Keats. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit. . . . In his letters he talks of suspecting everybody. It appeared not in his conversation. On the contrary, he was uniformly the apologist for poor frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man I ever knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. But if any act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden and animated indignation." 2

Lastly, "He had no fears of self," says George Keats; "through interference in the quarrels of others, he would at all hazards, and without calculating his powers to defend, or his reward for the deed, defend the oppressed and distressed with heart and soul, with hand and purse."

In this chorus of admiring affection Haydon alone must assert his own superiority by mixing depreciation with praise. When he laments over Keats's dissipations he exaggerates, there is evidence enough to show, idly and calumniously. When, on the other hand, he speaks of the poet's "want of decision of character and power of will," and says that "never for two days did he know his own

1 Houghton MSS.

2 lbid.

intentions," his criticism is deserving of more attention. This is only Haydon's way of describing a fact in Keats's nature of which no one was better aware than himself. He acknowledges his own "unsteady and vagarish disposition." What he means is no weakness of instinct or principle affecting the springs of conduct in regard to others, but a liability to veerings of opinion and purpose in regard to himself. "The Celtic instability "a reader may perhaps surmise who adopts that hypothesis as to the poet's descent. Whether the quality was one of race or not, it was probably inseparable from the peculiar complexion of Keats's genius. Or rather it was an expression in character of that which was the very essence of that genius, the predominance, namely, of the sympathetic imagination over every other faculty. Acute as was his own emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the order of poets whose work is inspired, not mainly by their own personality, but by the world of things and men outside them. He realised clearly the nature of his own gift, and the degree to which susceptibility to external impressions was apt to overpower in him—not practical consistency only, but even the sense of a personal identity.

"As to the poetic character itself," he writes, “(I mean that sort of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself—it has no self-it is everything and nothing-it has no character-it enjoys light and shade-it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated —it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he is continually in for, and filling, some other body.... If, then, he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops? It