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will not run with that most vulgar of all crowds, the literary. Such things I ratify by looking upon myself, and trying myself at lifting mental weights, as it were. I am three and twenty, with little knowledge and middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing.

Some five weeks later, about mid-April, we find that Haydon himself has been a contributing cause to Keats's poetic inactivity by his behaviour in regard to the loan which Keats had hoped but so far been unable to make him. The failure he writes, has not been his fault:

I am doubly hurt at the slightly reproachful tone of your note and at the occasion of it,-for it must be some other disappointment; you seem'd so sure of some important help when last I saw you-now you have maimed me again; I was whole, I had begun reading again-when your note came I was engaged in a Book. I dread as much as a Plague the idle fever of two months more without any fruit. I will walk over the first fine day: then see what aspect your affairs have taken, and if they should continue gloomy walk into the City to Abbey and get his consent for I am persuaded that to me alone he will not concede a jot.

In the journal-letter of these weeks to his brother and sister-in-law, mentioning how he had been asked to join Woodhouse over a bottle of claret at his coffee-house, he breaks into a rhapsody over the virtues and wholesomeness of that beverage and adds 'this same claret is the only palate-passion I have-I forgot game-I must plead guilty to the breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the back-bone of a grouse, the wing and side of a Pheasant, and a Woodcock passim.' Turning to his own affairs, he says,

I am in no despair about them-my poem has not at all succeeded; in the course of a year or so I think I shall try the public again-in a selfish point of view I should suffer my pride and my contempt of public opinion to hold me silent-but for yours and Fanny's sake I will pluck up a spirit and try again. I have no doubt of success in a course of years if I persevere-but it must be patience for the Reviews have enervated and made indolent

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men's minds-few think for themselves. These Reviews are getting more and more powerful, especially the Quarterly-they are like a superstition which the more it prostrates the Crowd and the longer it continues the more powerful it becomes just in proportion to their increasing weakness. I was in hopes that when people saw, as they must do now, all the trickery and iniquity of these Plagues they would scout them, but no, they are like the spectators at the Westminster cock-pit-they like the battle and do not care who wins or who loses.

Among other matters he has a long story to tell about his friend Bailey's fickleness in love. It appears that Bailey, after a first unfortunate love-affair, had during the past year been paying his addresses to Mariane Reynolds, begging that she would take time to consider her answer, and that while her decision was still uncertain Bailey, to the great indignation of all the Reynolds family and a little to Keats's own, had engaged himself in Scotland to the sister of his friend Gleig, afterwards well known as author of The Subaltern and Chaplain General to the Forces. Next Keats begins quoting with a natural zest of admiration, almost in full, that incomparable piece of studied and sustained invective, Hazlitt's Letter to William Gifford Esqr., beside which Gifford's own controversial virulences seem relatively blunt and boorish. Half way through Keats has to say he will copy the rest to-morrow,

for the candles are burnt down and I am using the wax taper -which has a long snuff on it-the fire is at its last click-I am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet-I am writing this on the Maid's tragedy which I have read since tea with Great pleasure. Beside this volume of Beaumont and Fletcher-there are on the table two volumes of Chaucer and a new work of Tom Moore's called Tom Cribb's Memorial to Congress,-nothing in it. These are trifles but I require nothing so much of you but that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to me. Could I see that same thing done of any great Man long since dead it would be a great delight: As to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he began 'To be or not to be'-such things become interesting from distance of time or

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place. I hope you are both now in that sweet sleep which no two beings deserve more than you do-I must fancy you soand please myself in the fancy of speaking a prayer and a blessing over you and your lives-God bless you-I whisper good night in your ears and you will dream of me.

This is on the 13th of March. Six days later he gives another picture, this time of his state of body rather than of mind:

This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely careless-I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's Castle of Indolence my passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor, but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase-a Man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body over-powering the Mind.

The criticism is foolish which sees in this passage the expression of a languid, self-indulgent nature, and especially foolish considering the footnote in which Keats observes that at the moment he has a black eye. The black eye was no doubt the mark of the fight in which he had lately well thrashed a young blackguard of a butcher whom he found tormenting a kitten. That the said fight took place just about this time is clear by the following evidences. Cowden Clarke, in his recollections communicated privately to Lord Houghton, writes, "The last time I saw Keats was during his residence with Mr Brown. I spent the day with him; and he read to me the poem he had last finished-The Eve of St Agnes. Shortly after this I removed many miles from London, and was spared the sorrow of beholding the progress of the disease that was to take