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made to speak as much sound sense, elevated morality, and true piety, as any divine who ever wrote. If I were to meet such a man, I should almost hate myself for laughing at his eccentricities."

The opening reference here to a Spanish face must relate to the fact that Miss Fanny Keats, who in girlhood had been the recipient of many affectionate and attentive letters from her brother John, was engaged to, and eventually married, a Spanish gentleman, Senhor Llanos, author of "Don Esteban," "Sandoval the Freemason," and other books illustrating the modern history of his country. He was a Liberal, and in the time of the Spanish Republic represented his Government at the Court of Rome. Mrs. Llanos is still living at a very advanced age. A few years ago a pension on the Civil List was conferred upon her, in national recognition of what is due to the sister of John Keats. There is a pathetic reference to her appearance at the close of the very last letter which he wrote: "My sister, who walks about my imagination like a ghost, she is so like Tom."

Miss Brawne married a Mr. Lindon some years after the death of Keats. I do not know how many years, but it must have been later than June 1825. She died in 1865.

The sincerity or otherwise of Leigh Hunt as a personal, and more especially a literary, friend of Keats, has been a good deal canvassed of late. It has been said that he showed little staunchness in championing the cause of Keats at the time-towards the close of 1818-when detraction was most rampant, and when support from a

man occupying the position of editor of The Examiner would have been most serviceable. But one must not hurry to assume that Hunt was seriously in the wrong, whether we regard the question as one of individual friendship or of literary policy. The attacks upon Keats were in great measure flank-attacks upon Hunt himself. Keats was abused on the ground that he wrote bad poetry through imitating Hunt's bad poetry-that he outHeroded Herod, or out-Hunted Hunt. Obviously it was a delicate task which would have lain before the elder poet for any direct defence of Keats must have been conducted on the thesis either that the faults were not there (when indeed they were there to a large extent); or else that the faults were in fact beauties, an allegation which would only have riveted the charge that they were Leigh-Huntish mannerisms; or finally that they were not due to Hunt's influence or example, but were proper to Keats in person, and this would have been more in the nature of censure than of vindication. A defence on general grounds, upholding the poems without any discussion of the particular faults alleged, would also, as coming from Hunt, have been a difficult thing to manage: it would rather have inflamed than abated the rancour of the enemy. Besides, we must remember that Keats's first volume, though very warmly accepted and praised by Hunt, was really but beginner's work, imperfect in the last degree; while the second volume, "Endymion," was viewed by Hunt as a hazardous and immature attempt notwithstanding its many beauties, and incapable of being upheld beyond a certain limit. There was not at that date any third volume to be put forward in proof of

faculty, or in arrest of judgment. Mr. Forman, than whom no man looks with more patience into the evidence on a question such as this of Hunt's friendship, or is more likely to pronounce a sound judgment upon it, wholly scouts the accusation; and I am quite content to range myself on the same side as Mr. Forman.

Of Keats's friends in general it may be said that the one whom he respected very highly in point of character was Bailey the one who had a degree of genius fully worthy, whatever its limitations and defects, of communing with his own, was Haydon. Shelley can hardly be reckoned among his friends, though very willing and even earnest to be such, both in life and after death, Keats held visibly aloof from Shelley, more perhaps on the ground of his being a man of some family and position than from any other motive. Shortly after the publication of "The Revolt of Islam," Keats's rather naïve expression was, "Poor Shelley, I think he has his quota of good qualities." Neither did he show any warm or frank admiration of Shelley's poetry. On receiving a copy of "The Cenci," he urged its author to "curb his magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of his subject with ore." We should not ascribe this to any mean-spirited jealousy, but to that sense, which grew to a great degree of intensity in Keats, that the art of composition and execution is of paramount importance in poetry, and must supersede all considerations of abstract or proselytizing intention.

I

CHAPTER VIII.

MUST next proceed to offer some account of Keats's person, character, and turn of mind.

As I have already said, Keats was a very small man, barely more than five feet in height. He was called "Little Keats by his surgical fellow-students. Archdeacon Bailey has left a good description of him in brief:

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"There was in the character of his countenance the femineity which Coleridge thought to be the mental constitution of true genius. His hair was beautiful, and, if you placed your hand upon his head, the curls fell round it like a rich plumage. I do not particularly remember the thickness of the upper lip so generally described; but the mouth was too wide, and out of harmony with the rest of his face, which had a peculiar sweetness of expression, with a character of mature thought, and an almost painful sense of suffering.”

Leigh Hunt should also be heard :

"His lower limbs were small in comparison with the upper, but neat and well-turned. His shoulders were

very broad for his size. He had a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up-an eager power checked and made impatient by ill-health. Every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately alive. If there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. His face was rather long than otherwise. The upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing-large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled. In this there was ill-health as well as imagination, for he did not like these betrayals of emotion; and he had great personal as well as moral courage. His hair, of a brown colour, was fine, and hung in natural ringlets. The head was a puzzle for the phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull; a singularity which he had in common with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get on. Keats was sensible of the disproportion above noticed between his upper and lower extremities; and he would look at his hand, which was faded, and swollen in the veins, and say it was the hand of a man of fifty.”

Cowden Clarke confirms Hunt in stating that Keats's hair was brown, and he assigns the same colour, or dark hazel, to his eyes: confuting the "auburn " and "blue" of which Mrs. Procter had spoken. It is rather remarkable that, while Hunt speaks of the projection of the upper lip-a detail which is fully verified in a charcoal drawing by Severn-Lord Houghton observes upon "the

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