some bantering verses about Brown, which are understood to go mainly by contraries: we therefore infer Brown to have presented a physical and moral aspect the reverse of the following

"He is to meet a melancholy carle,

Thin in the waist, with bushy head of hair,
As hath the seeded thistle when a parle
It holds with Zephyr ere it sendeth fair
Its light balloons into the summer air.
Thereto his beard had not begun to bloom;

No brush had touched his chin, or razor sheer;
No care had touched his cheek with mortal doom,
But new he was and bright as scarf from Persian loom.

"Ne carèd he for wine or half-and-half,

Ne cared he for fish or flesh or fowl,
And sauces held he worthless as the chaff;

He 'sdained the swine-head at the wassail bowl.
Ne with lewd ribalds sat he cheek by jowl,
Ne with sly lemans in the scorner's chair;
But after water-brooks this pilgrim's soul
Panted, and all his food was woodland air,
Though he would oft-times feast on gillyflowers rare.

"The slang of cities in no wise he knew ;

'Tipping the wink' to him was heathen Greek.

He sipped no olden Tom or ruin blue,

Or Nantz or cherry-brandy, drank full meek
By many a damsel brave and rouge of cheek.
Nor did he know each aged watchman's beat;
Nor in obscured purlieus would he seek
For curled Jewesses with ankles neat,

Who, as they walk abroad, make tinkling with their feet."

Mr. Brown, son of a London stockbroker from Scotland, was a man several years older than Keats, born in 1786.

He was a Russia merchant retired from business, of much culture and instinctive sympathy with genius, and he enjoyed assisting the efforts of young men of promise. He had produced the libretto of an opera, "Narensky," and he eventually published a book on the Sonnets of Shakespeare. From the date we have now reached, the summer of 1818, which was more than a year following their first introduction, Brown may be regarded as the most intimate of all Keats's friends, Dilke coming next to him.

The pedestrian tour with Brown was the sequel of a family leave-taking at Liverpool. George Keats, finding in himself no vocation for trade, with its smug compliances and sleek assiduities (and John agreed with him in these views), had determined to emigrate to America, and rough it in a new settlement for a living, perhaps for fortune; and, as a preliminary step, he had married Miss Georgiana Augusta Wylie, a girl of sixteen, daughter of a deceased naval officer. The sonnet "Nymph of the downward smile" &c. was addressed to her. John Keats and Brown, therefore, accompanied George and his bride to Liverpool, and saw them off. They then started as pedestrians into the Lake country, the land of Burns, Belfast, and the Western Highlands. Before starting on the trip Keats had often been in such a state of health as to make it prudent that he should not hazard exposure to night air; but in his excursion he seems to have acted like a man of sound and rather hardy physique, walking from day to day about twenty miles, and sometimes more, and his various records of the trip have nothing of a morbid or invaliding tone. This was not,

however, to last long; the Isle of Mull proved too much for him. On the 23rd of July, writing to his brother Tom, he describes the expedition thus: "The road through the island, or rather track, is the most dreary you can think of; between dreary mountains, over bog and rock and river, with our breeches tucked up and our stockings in hand. . . . We had a most wretched walk of thirty-seven miles across the island of Mull, and then we crossed to Iona." In another letter he says: "Walked up to my knees in bog; got a sore throat; gone to see Icolmkill and Staffa." From this time forward the mention of the sore throat occurs again and again; sometimes it is subsiding, or as good as gone; at other times it has returned, and causes more or less inconvenience. Brown wrote of it as "a violent cold and ulcerated throat." The latest reference to it comes in December 1819, only two months preceding the final and alarming break-down in the young poet's health. In Scotland, at any rate, amid the exposure and exertion of the walking tour, the sore throat was not to be staved off; so, having got as far as Inverness, Keats, under medical advice, reluctantly cut his journey short, parted from Brown, and went on board the smack from Cromarty. A nine days' passage brought him to London Bridge, and on the 18th of August he presented himself to the rather dismayed eyes of Mrs. Dilke. "John Keats," she wrote, "arrived here last night, as brown and as shabby as you can imagine: scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torr at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell what he looked like." More ought to be said here of the details of Keats's Scottish and Irish trip; but such

details, not being of essential importance as incidents in his life, could only be given satisfactorily in the form of copious extracts from his letters, and for these-readable and picturesque as they are-I have not adequate space. He preferred, on the whole, the Scotch people to the little which he saw of the Irish. Just as Keats was leaving Scotland, because of his own ailments, he had been summoned away thence on account of the more visibly grave malady of his brother Tom, who was in an advanced stage of consumption; but it appears that the letter did not reach his hands at the time.

The next three months were passed by Keats along with Tom at their Hampstead lodgings. Anxiety and affection-warm affection, deep anxiety-were of no avail. Tom died at the beginning of December, aged just twenty, and was buried on the 7th of that month. The words in "King Lear," "Poor Tom," remain underlined by the surviving brother.

John Keats was now solitary in the world. Tom was dead, George and his bride in America, Fanny, his girlish sister, a permanent inmate of the household of Mr. and Mrs. Abbey at Walthamstow. In December he quitted his lodgings at Hampstead, and set up house along with Mr. Brown in what was then called Wentworth Place, Hampstead, now Lawn Bank; Brown being rightly the tenant, and Keats a paying resident with Brown. Wentworth Place consisted of only two houses. One of them was thus inhabited by Brown and Keats, the other by the Dilkes. In the first of these houses, when Brown and Keats were away, and afterwards in the second, there was also a well-to-do family of the name of Brawne,—a

mother, with a son and two daughters. Lawn Bank is the penultimate house on the right of John Street, next to Wentworth House: Dr. Sharpey passed some of his later years in it. This is, beyond all others, the dwelling which remains permanently linked with the memory of Keats.

While Tom was still lingering out the days of his brief life, Keats made the acquaintance of two young ladies. He has left us a description of both of them. His portraiture of the first, Miss Jane Cox, is written in a tone which might seem the preliminary to a grande passion; but this did not prove so; she rapidly passed out of his existence and out of his memory. His portraiture of the second, Miss Fanny Brawne, does not suggest anything beyond a tepid liking which might perhaps merge into a definite antipathy; this also was delusive, for he was from the first smitten with Miss Brawne, and soon profoundly in love with her-I might say desperately in love, for indeed desperation, which became despair, was the main ingredient in his passion, in all but its earliest stages. I shall here extract these two passages, for both of them are of exceptional importance for our biography— one as acquainting us with Keats's general range of feeling in relation to women, and the other as introducing the most serious and absorbing sentiment of the last two years of his life. On October 29, 1818, he wrote as follows to his brother George and his wife in America :

On

"The Misses Reynolds are very kind to me. my return, the first day I called [this was probably towards the 20th of September], they were in a sort of