affection, and once in petulant and froward excite

ment.

The parents would have liked to send John to Harrow school but, this being finally deemed too expensive, he was placed in the Rev. John Clarke's school at Enfield, then in high repute, and his brothers followed him thither. The Enfield schoolhouse was a fine red-brick building of the early eighteenth century, said to have been erected by a retired West India merchant; the materials "moulded into designs decorating the front with garlands of flowers and pomegranates, together with heads of cherubim over two niches in the centre of the building." This central part of the façade was eventually purchased for the South Kensington Museum, and figures there as a screen in the structural division. The schoolroom was forty feet long; the playground was a spacious courtyard between the schoolroom and the house itself; a garden, a hundred yards in length, stretched beyond the playground, succeeded by a sweep of greensward, with a "lake" or wellsized pond: there was also a two-acre field with a couple of cows. In this commodious seat of sound learning, well cared for and well instructed so far as his school course extended, John Keats remained for some years. He came under the particular observation of the headmaster's son, Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke, not very many years his senior. He was born in 1787, fostered Keats's interest in literature, became himself an industrious writer of some standing, and died in 1877. Keats at school did not show any exceptional talent, but he was, according to Mr. Cowden Clarke's phrase, "a very orderly scholar," and got easily through his tasks. In the last eighteen

months of his schooling he took a new lease of assiduity: he read a vast deal, and would keep to his book even during meals. For two or three successive half-years he obtained the first prize for voluntary work; and was to be found early and late attending to some translation from the Latin or the French, to which he would, when allowed his own way, sacrifice his recreation-time. He was particularly fond of Lemprière's "Classical Dictionary," Tooke's "Pantheon," and Spence's "Polymetis": a line of reading presageful of his own afterwork in the region of Greek mythology. Of the Grecian language, however, he learned nothing: in Latin he proceeded as far as the Æneid, and of his own accord translated much of that epic in writing. Two of his favourite books were "Robinson Crusoe" and Marmontel's "Incas of Peru." He must also have made some acquaintance with Shakespeare, as he told a younger schoolfellow that he thought no one durst read "Macbeth" alone in the house at two in the morning. Not indeed that these bookish leanings. formed the whole of his personality as a schoolboy. He was noticeable for beauty of face and expression, active and energetic, intensely pugnacious, and even quarrelsome. He was very apt to get into a fight with boys much bigger than himself. Nor was his younger brother George exempted: John would fight fiercely with George, and this (if we may trust George's testimony) was always owing to John's own unmanageable temper. The two brothers were none the less greatly attached, both at school and afterwards. The youngest brother, Thomas (always called Tom in family records), is reported to have been as pugilistic as John; whereas George, when

allowed his own way, was pacific, albeit resolute. The ideal of all the three boys was a maternal uncle, a naval officer of very stalwart presence, who had been in Admiral Duncan's ship in the famous action off Camperdown; where he had distinguished himself not only by signal gallantry, but by not getting shot, though his tall form was a continual mark for hostile guns.

While still a schoolboy at Enfield, John Keats lost both his parents. The father died on the 16th of April 1804, in returning from a visit to the school: a detail which serves to show us (for I do not find it otherwise affirmed) that John could at the utmost have been only in the ninth year of his age, possibly even younger, when his schooling began. On leaving Enfield, the father dined at Southgate, and, going late homewards, his horse fell in the City Road, and the rider's skull was fractured. He was found about one o'clock in the morning speechless, and expired towards eight, aged thirty-six. The mother suffered from rheumatism, and later on from consumption; of which she died in February 1810. "John," so writes Haydon, "sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine or even cook her food but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease." She had been an easily consoled widow, for, within a year from the decease of her first husband, she married another, William Rawlings, who had probably succeeded to the management of the business. She soon, however, separated from Rawlings, and lived with her mother at Edmonton. After her death Keats hid himself for some days in a nook under his master's desk, passionately inconsolable. The four children, who inherited from their grandparents (chiefly from their grandmother) a moderate

fortune of nearly £8,000 altogether, in which the daughter had the largest share, were then left under the guardianship of Mr. Abbey, a city merchant residing at Walthamstow. At the age of fifteen, or at some date before the close of 1810, John quitted his school.

A little stave of doggrel which Keats wrote to his sister, probably in July 1818, gives a glimpse of what he was like at the time when he and his brothers were living with their grandmother.

"There was a naughty boy,

And a naughty boy was he:
He kept little fishes

In washing-tubs three,
In spite

Of the might

Of the maid,

a Nor afraid

Of his granny good.

He often would

Hurly-burly

Get up early

And go

By hook or crook

To the brook,

And bring home

Miller's-thumb,

Tittlebat,

Not over fat,

Minnows small

As the stall

Of a glove,
Not above

The size

Of a nice

Little baby's
Little fingers."

2

He was fond of "goldfinches, tomtits, minnows, mice, ticklebacks, dace, cock-salmons, and all the whole tribe of the bushes and the brooks."

A career in life was promptly marked out for the youth. While still aged fifteen, he was apprenticed, with a premium of £210, to Mr. Hammond, a surgeon of some repute at Edmonton. Mr. Cowden Clarke says that this arrangement evidently gave Keats satisfaction: apparently he refers rather to the convenient vicinity of Edmonton to Enfield than to the surgical profession itself. The indenture was to have lasted five years; but, for some. reason which is not wholly apparent, Keats left Hammond before the close of his apprenticeship. If Haydon was rightly informed (presumably by Keats himself), the reason was that the youth resented surgery as the antagonist of a possible poetic vocation, and "at last his master, weary of his disgust, gave him up his time." He then took to walking St. Thomas's Hospital; and, after a short

A small point here may deserve a note. A letter from John Keats to his brother George, under date of September 21st, 1819, contains the following words: "Our bodies, every seven years, are completely fresh-materialed: seven years ago it was not this hand that clenched itself against Hammond." Another version of the same letter (the true wording of which is matter of some dispute) substitutes: "Mine is not the same hand I clenched at Hammond's." Mr. Buxton Forman, who gives the former phrase as the genuine one, thinks that "this phrase points to a serious rupture as the cause of his quitting his apprenticeship to Hammond." My own inclination is to surmise that the accurate reading may be "It was not this hand that clenched itself against Hammond's"; indicating, not any quarrel, but the friendly habitual clasp of hand against hand. 66 Seven years ago " would reach back to September 1812: whereas Keats did not part from Hammond until 1814.