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 (chiely 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,

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."

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

1 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. "Seven years ago " would reach back to September 1812: whereas Keats did not part from Hammond until 1814.

stay at No. 8 Dean Street, Borough, and next in St. Thomas's Street, he resided along with his two brothers— who were at the time clerks in Mr. Abbey's office—in the Poultry, Cheapside, over the passage which led to the Queen's Arms Tavern. Two of his surgical companions were Mr. Henry Stephens, who afterwards introduced. creosote into medical practice, and Mr. George Wilson Mackereth. Keats attended the usual lectures, and made careful annotations in a book still preserved. Mr. Stephens relates that Keats was fond of scribbling rhyme of a sort among professional notes, especially those of a fellow-student, and he sometimes showed graver verses to his associates. Finally, in July 1815, he passed the examination at Apothecaries' Hall with considerable credit

-more than his familiars had counted upon; and in March 1816 he was appointed a dresser at Guy's under Mr. Lucas. Cowden Clarke once inquired how far Keats liked his studies at the hospital. The youth replied that he did not relish anatomy: "The other day, for instance, during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray, and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland."

Readers of Keats's poetry will have no difficulty in believing that, ever since his first introduction into a professional life, surgery and literature had claimed a divided allegiance from him. When at Edmonton with Mr. Hammond, he kept up his connection with the Clarke family, especially with Charles Cowden Clarke. He was perpetually borrowing books; and at last, about the beginning of 1812 he asked for Spenser's

A

"Faery Queen," rather to the surprise of the family, who had no idea that that particular book could be at all in his line. The effect, however, was very noticeable. Keats walked to Enfield at least once a week, for the purpose of talking over Spenser with Cowden Clarke. "He ramped through the scenes of the romance," said Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." A fine touch of description or of imagery, or energetic epithets such as "the sea-shouldering whale," would light up his face with ecstasy. His leisure had already been given to reading and translation, including the completion of his rendering of the Æneid. literary craving was now at fever-heat, and he took to writing verses as well as reading them. Soon surgery and letters were to conflict no longer-the latter obtaining, contrary to the liking of Mr. Abbey, the absolute and permanent mastery. Keats indeed always denied that he abandoned surgery for the express purpose of taking to poetry: he alleged that his motive had been the dread of doing some mischief in his surgical operations. His last operation consisted in opening a temporal artery; he was entirely successful in it, but the success appeared to himself like a miracle, the recurrence of which was not to be reckoned on.

While surgery was waning with Keats, and finally dying out an upshot for which the exact date is not assigned, nor perhaps assignable-he was making, at first through his intimacy with Cowden Clarke, some good literary acquaintances. The brothers John and Leigh Hunt were the centre of the circle to which Keats was thus admitted. John was the publisher, and Leigh the