nothing in print to account for his leaving it unfinished.

In May 1819 Keats had an idea of inventing a new structure of sonnet-rhyme; and he sent to his brother and sister-in-law a sonnet composed accordingly, beginning

"If by dull rhymes our English must be chained."

He wrote: "I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet-stanza than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language well, from the pouncing rhymes. The other appears too elegiac, and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect. I do not pretend to have succeeded." Keats's experiment reads agreeably. It comprises five rhymes altogether; the first rhyme being repeated thrice at arbitrary intervals; and the last rhyme twice in lines twelve and fourteen.

The tragedy of "Otho the Great" was written by Keats (as already referred to) in July and August 1819, in co-operation with Armitage Brown. The diction of the play is, it would appear, Keats's entirely; whereas the invention and development of plot in the first four acts is wholly due to Brown. The two friends sat together; Brown described each successive scene, and Keats turned it into verse, without troubling his head as to the subject-matter for the scene next ensuing. When it came to the fifth act, however, Keats inquired what would be the conclusion of the play; and, not being satisfied with Brown's project which he deemed too humorous and too melodramatic, he both invented and

wrote a fifth act for himself. He felt sure that "Otho the Great" was "a tolerable tragedy," and set his heart upon getting it acted-Kean was well inclined to take the principal character, Prince Ludolph; and it became his greatest ambition to write fine plays. "Otho" was in fact accepted for Drury Lane Theatre, on the offer of Brown, who left Keats's authorship in the background; but, as both the writers were impatient of delay, Brown, in February 1820, took away the MS., and Covent Garden Theatre was thought of instead-without any practical result. As soon as "Otho" was finished, Brown suggested King Stephen as the subject of another drama; and Keats, without any further collaboration from his friend, composed the few scenes of it which remain. "One of my ambitions" (writes Keats to Bailey in August 1819), "is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting."

The ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci," than which Keats did nothing more thrilling or more perfect, may perhaps have been written in the earlier half of 1819; it was published in 1820, in Hunt's Indicator for May 10th, under the signature "Caviare"; the same signature which was adopted for the sonnet, "A dream, after reading Dante's episode of Paolo and Francesca." Keats may probably have meant to imply, in some bitterness of spirit, that his poems were "caviare to the general." The title of this ballad was suggested to Keats by seeing it at the head of a translation from Alain Chartier in a copy of Chaucer. As to the "Dream" sonnet he wrote in April 1819

"The 5th canto of Dante pleases me more and more; it is that one in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca. I had passed many days in rather a low state of mind, and in the midst of them I dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was one of the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life. I floated about the wheeling atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful figure, to whose lips mine were joined, it seemed for an age; and in the midst of all this cold and darkness I was warm. Ever-flowery tree-tops sprang up, and we rested on them, sometimes with the lightness of a cloud, till the wind blew us away again. I tried a sonnet on it; there are fourteen lines in it, but nothing of what I felt. Oh that I could dream it every night!"

The last long work which Keats undertook, and he wrote it with extreme facility, was "The Cap and Bells; or The Jealousies, a Fairy Tale," in the Spenserian stanza. What remains is probably far less than Keats intended the tale to amount to, but it is enough to enable us to pronounce upon its merits. The poem was begun soon after Keats's first attack of blood-spitting in February 1820. It seems singular that under such depressing conditions he should have written in so frivolous and jaunty a spirit, and provoking that his last long work (the last, that is, if we except the recast of "Hyperion") should be about the most valueless which he produced, at any date after commencing upon "Endymion." This poem has been said to be written in the spirit of Ariosto; a statement which, in justice to the brilliant Italian, cannot be admitted. It may well be, however,

as Lord Houghton suggests, that the general notion was suggested by Brown, who had translated the first five cantos (not indeed of Ariosto, but) of the "Orlando Innamorato' of Bojardo. "The Cap and Bells " appears to be destitute of distinct plan, though some sort of satirical allusion to the marital and extra-marital exploits of George IV. is traceable in it; meagre and purposeless in invention; a poor farrago of pumped-up and straggling jocosity. Perhaps a hearty laugh has never been got out of it; although there are points here and there at which a faint snigger may be permissible, and the concluding portion improves somewhat. Keats seems to have intended to publish it under a pseudonym, Lucy Vaughan Lloyd; and Hunt gave, in The Indicator of August 23, 1820, some taste of its quality, possibly meaning to print more of it anon.

The last verses which Keats ever wrote formed the sonnet here ensuing. He composed this late in September 1820, after landing on the Dorsetshire coast, probably near Lulworth, and returning to the ship which bore him to his doom in Italy; and he wrote it down on a blank page in Shakespeare's Poems, facing "A Lover's Complaint."

"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art;
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors :—

No, yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest ;

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever-or else swoon to death."

Of poetic projects which remained unfulfilled when Keats died we hear-leaving out of count the works which he had begun and left uncompleted-of only one. During his voyage to Naples he often spoke of wishing to write the story of Sabrina, as indicated in Milton's "Comus," connecting it with some points in English history and character.

In prose-apart from his letters, which are noticeably various in mood, matter, and manner, and contain many admirable things-Keats wrote extremely little. In a weekly paper with which Reynolds was connected, The Champion, December 1817, he published two articles on "Kean as a Shakespearean Actor:" they are not remarkable. With the above-named articles are now associated some "Notes on Shakespeare," not written with a view to publication; these appear to me somewhat strained and bloated. There are also some "Notes on Milton's Paradise Lost."" On September 22, 1819, Keats addressed to Mr. Dilke a letter, which however does not appear to have been actually sent off. As it shows a definite intention of writing in prose for regular publication and for an income, a few sentences are worth quoting.

"It concerns a resolution I have taken to endeavour