capital fellow, we have stummed up a kind of contrivance whereby he will be enabled to do himself the benefits you will lay in his Path. I have a great Idea that he will be a tolerable neat brush. 'Tis perhaps the finest thing that will befal him this many a year for he is just of an age to get grounded in bad habits from which you will pluck him. He brought a copy of Mary Queen of Scots: it appears to me that he has copied the bad style of the painting, as well as coloured the eyebal[1]s yellow like the original. He has also the fault that you pointed out to me in Hazlitt on the constringing and diffusing of substance. However I really believe that he will take fire at the sight of your Picture—and set about things. If he can get ready in time to return to town with me, which will be in a few days I will bring him to you. You will be glad to hear that within. these last three weeks I have written 1000 lines-which are the third Book of my Poem. My Ideas with respect to it I assure you are very low-and I would write the subject thoroughly again-but I am tired of it and think

oblige me by going to Magdalen College and inquiring of the porter there about a young man who, when I was lately at Oxford, was copying the altar-piece at Magdalen by Morales. I am anxious to know about that young man-the copy promised something. Will you, if you can, see the young man, and ascertain what his wishes in Art are? if he has ambition and seems to possess power? all of which you can soon discover. In these cases should any friend be disposed to assist him up to London and to support him for a year, I will train him in the Art with no further remuneration than the pleasure of seeing him advance. I will put him in the right way, and do all I can to advance him. Do oblige me by exerting yourself in this case for me. Perhaps Mr. Bailey, may also feel interest. Remember me to him."

This word is certainly stummed in the original letter; and I think stummed, in the sense of strengthened, is more probably what Keats meant to write than either strummed or stumped.

the time would be better spent in writing a new Romance which I have in my eye for next summer-Rome was not built in a Day—and all the good I expect from my employment this summer is the fruit of Experience which I hope to gather in my next Poem. Bailey's kindest wishes and my vow of being

Yours eternally

John Keats

XVI.

To BENJAMIN BAILEY.

8 October 1817.

I refused to visit Shelley, that I might have my own unfettered scope. As to what you say about my being a Poet, I can return no answer but by saying that the high idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I see it towering too high above me. At any rate I have no right to talk until "Endymion" is finished. It will be a test, a trial of my powers of imagination, and chiefly of my invention which is a rare thing indeed-by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry. And when I consider that this is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces towards the Temple of Fame,-it makes me say "God forbid that I should be without such a task!" I have heard Hunt say, and may be asked, "Why endeavour after a long poem?" To which I should answer, "Do not the lovers of poetry like to have a little region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are for

gotten and found new in a second reading,—which may be food for a week's stroll in the summer?" Do not they like this better than what they can read through before Mrs. Williams comes down stairs?—a morning's work at most.

Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the polar star of poetry, as Fancy is the sails, and Imagination the rudder. Did our great poets ever write short pieces? I mean, in the shape of Tales. This same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten as a poetical excellence.' But enough of thisI put on no laurels till I shall have finished "Endymion," and I hope Apollo is not angered at my having made mockery of him at Hunt's.

The little mercury I have taken has corrected the poison and improved my health-though I feel from my employment that I shall never again be secure in robustness. Would that you were as well as

Your sincere friend and brother,

John Keats.

If invention were the only thing to desire in a romantic poem, Endymion would probably stand at the head of modern romance poetry, its wealth in that particular being surpassingly great.

2

Speaking of Keats's health during the winter of 1817-18, Lord Houghton says "His health does not seem to have prevented him from indulging somewhat in that dissipation which is the natural outlet for the young energies of ardent temperaments, unconscious how scanty a portion of vital strength had been allotted him; but a strictly regulated and abstinent life would have appeared to him pedantic and sentimental. He did not, however, to any serious extent, allow wine to usurp on his intellect, or games of chance to impair his means, for, in his letters to his brothers, he speaks of having drunk too much as a rare piece of joviality, and of having won 10l. at cards as a great hit."

XVII.

To BENJAMIN BAILEY.

[October, 1817.]

There has been a flaming attack upon Hunt in the "Edinburgh Magazine." I never read anything so virulent, -accusing him of the greatest crimes, depreciating his wife, his poetry, his habits, his company, his conversation. These philippics are to come out in numbers— called, "The Cockney School of Poetry." There has been but one number published—that on Hunt-to which they have prefixed a motto from one Cornelius Webb, "Poetaster"—who, unfortunately, was of our party occasionally at Hampstead, and took it into his head to write the following: something about, "We'll talk on Wordsworth, Byron, a theme we never tire on; and so forth till he comes to Hunt and Keats. In the motto they have put

Lord Houghton gives this passage as the "Outside sheet of a letter to Mr. Bailey," and places it immediately after the letter to Mrs. Wylie at the end of the Scotch series; but it clearly belongs to October 1817, as that is the sole month in which one and only one of the articles on "The Cockney School" had appeared. Mr. Dykes Campbell has a copy of Keats's Poems (1817) with an inscription believed to be in Cornelius Webb's writing :-" This Book was given me by John Keats himself when published in 1817, he living at the time in lodgings near the Poultry of all places in the world for a descriptive poet!" It must have been some nine or ten months after writing the letter to Bailey that Keats received in Scotland the invitation referred to by Lord Houghton in the following passage:-"Some mutual friend had forwarded him an invitation from Messrs. Blackwood, injudiciously adding the suggestion, that it would be very advisable for him to visit the Modern Athens, and endeavour to conciliate his literary enemies in that quarter. The sensibility and moral dignity of Keats were outraged by this pro

Hunt and Keats in large letters. I have no doubt that the second number was intended for me, but have hopes of its non-appearance, from the following advertisement in last Sunday's Examiner:-"To Z.-The writer of the article signed Z., in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, for October, 1817, is invited to send his address to the printer of the Examiner, in order that justice may be executed on the proper person." I don't mind the thing much-but if he should go to such lengths with me as he has done with Hunt, I must infallibly call him to an account, if he be a human being, and appears in squares and theatres, where we might "possibly meet." I don't relish his abuse.

posal: it may be imagined what answer he returned, and also that this circumstance may not have been unconnected with the article on him which appeared in the August number of the 'Edinburgh Magazine,' as part of a series that had commenced the previous year, and concerning which he had already expressed himself freely." Lord Houghton gives Brown as his authority concerning the invitation, but adds—“Mr. Robert Blackwood, son of the Mr. Blackwood of that time, thinks the circumstance very improbable, and that Mr. Brown must have been mistaken or misinformed. It does, however, appear that in the July of 1818 Mr. Bailey met, at Bishop Gleig's, in Scotland, a leading contributor to 'Blackwood's Magazine,' with whom he had much conversation respecting Keats, especially about his relations with Leigh Hunt, and Mr. Bailey thought his confidence had been abused." Somebody's confidence was certainly abused in the most open and shameless manner; and why not Mr. Bailey's? The magazine at that time teemed with the frowsy and unsavoury personal gibes of which the possession of Christopher North" gave it a monopoly.