JOHN, was born in London on the 29th of October 1795. His father married the daughter of his employer, Mr Jennings, the proprietor of large livery-stables in Moorfields. The offspring of this marriage were George, who afterwards emigrated to America, John Thomas, and a sister several years their junior. John at an early age was sent, along with his brothers, to Mr Clarke's school at Enfield, where the three boys distinguished themselves by their strong pugnistic tendencies and general fierceness of disposition. They fought with every school-fellow who felt inclined to gratify them; and when no foe was procurable they supplied the deficiency in the best manner they could by fighting with one another. This pugnacious spirit was, however, in John combined with a passionate tenderness; he gave way on the slightest occasion to hysterical bursts of laughter and tears; and when, after a lingering illness, his mother died, to whom he was fondly attached, he hid himself in a nook under his master's desk for several days, and gave himself up to uncontrollable grief. His career at school was not for some time particularly remarkable; he learned his lessons with ease and kept a respectable position, but did not seem desirous to outstrip his fellows. Suddenly his ambition awoke; he determined to carry off the prizes in literature as well as in boxing, and, by dint of energy and sacrificing to his studies his walks and even his half-holidays, he succeeded. During this burst of industry at Enfield he translated the twelve books of the Iliad. On the death of his father the family were consigned to the guardianship of Mr Abbey, a merchant, and a sum of L8000 was left to be divided amongst them. Keats was designed for the medical profession, and after leaving school he was apprenticed for five years to Mr Hammond, a surgeon, at Edmonton. Living in the vicinity of Enfield, he still remained on terms of intimacy with the family of his former instructor, and found in his son Charles (since favourably known in litera- ture) a congenial and profitable companion. An ardent friendship sprang up between them; they walked together, talked together about the poets, and sometimes continued their readings of Chaucer and Spenser from evening till daylight. It was the study of the latter poet which seems to have first impelled Keats to original composition, and the influence of his favourite may be traced throughout all his productions. On the termination of his apprenticeship he removed to London for the purpose of walking the hospitals, and soon made the acquaintance of Mr Leigh Hunt, then editor of the Examiner, and subsequently that of Haydon, Hazlitt, Shelley, and others. Encouraged by the praise of his friends, he published his first volume, which, out of his own immediate circle, found few readers. The disease of his family beginning to manifest itself, he was advised to leave London, and while wandering about England—by his correspondence we trace him to the Isle of Wight, Margate, Oxford, and Canterbury—he was busy with the composition of Endymion. This, his first poem of any considerable length, was completed in November 1817, and published in the following year, with a very remarkable preface, exhibiting the earnestness with which he strove to perfect himself in his divine art, and giving utterance to a proud yet humble belief in his future fame. Its appearance was the signal for an assault in the Quarterly more than usually truculent, even in those days, when the reviewer wrote inflamed with political animosities, and when his pen was a tomahawk. Blackwood's Magazine in its turn emptied on the head of the poet all the vials of its wrath. Nothing was spared. His literary associates, his family, his private affairs, his profession, and even his name were made the subjects of the coarsest ridicule. Nor is this much to be wondered at. Keats had allied himself with a political party especially obnoxious to the Tories. Hazlitt and Hunt stank in the nostrils of Blackwood and the Quarterly, and their literary offences were equally unpardonable with their political ones. If the truth must be told, there was in the whole Cockney School, as it was then called, a good deal of effeminacy and puerile sentimentality. Hunt, its chief leader, was an apostle of cheerfulness and universal benevolence, and seemed to look upon fine scenery as only a more exquisite place for picnics. From their peculiar circumstances they lived very much in the society of one another; they "babbled of green fields," of streams, of flowers. They wrote sonnets to one another, sent one another bouquets of roses and baskets of fruit, they wreathed crowns of ivy and placed them on one another's foreheads. Although nothing could be calmer and nobler than the temper of Keat's mind, or more resolute than his purpose to cultivate himself to the utmost, he did not altogether escape the taint of weak sentiment. His first volume, although it contains one of the grandest sonnets in the language, and although the reader is every now and again delighted with fresh and unexpected beauties, is exceedingly crude and immature. The poet wanders about flowers and streams; he weeps for the mere delight he has in weeping; and disports himself in the strangest and uncoolest phraseology. Endymion, perhaps the richest poem in colour and music given to the world since the Comus of Milton, is far from being perfect. The reader is smothered in roses. The story is lost in ornament. You cannot see the string for the beads. The charm lies in single lines—seldom in linked and sustained passages. It is full of the same barbarous and dissonant diction, the same lax and nerveless versification, which disfigured his earlier productions. He still wrote in a style of babyish effeminacy about

"Plims

Ready to melt between an infant's gums."

These and lines of a similar nauseous sweetness are of the most frequent occurrence.

Shortly after the publication of Endymion, Keats, accompanied by his friend and correspondent, Mr Brown, started on a pedestrian tour through the north of England and Scotland. His chief object was, of course, to re-establish his health, but he also hoped, by familiarising himself with the stern and gloomy scenery of a mountainous region, to raise his mind to the proper elevation, and to furnish him with fit imagery for a story of the fallen Satyrnian gods; for at this time he had already planned Hyperion.

The travellers, disappointed in meeting Wordsworth at the Lakes, bent their course to Scotland, where everything connected with the memory of Burns interested them; and it is characteristic of Keats that he made a point of writing a sonnet in the cottage where the great poet was born. They visited Ireland, but soon returned to Ayrshire, and pursued their course northwards, touched at Staffa and Iona, and penetrated as far as Inverness. From this point, a severe cold caught on the road and unfortunately resulting in inflammation of the throat, determined Keats to return to London. On his arrival he was shocked to find his younger brother at the point of death; he hurried down to Teignmouth, and brought the invalid to London, who, however, survived the removal only a few days. This event, in which the poet read a prophecy of his own fate, threw a deeper shade of despondency over his mind. Immediately after his brother's death may be dated the beginning of the passion which throws such a tragedy over the closing months of his career. Calling on one occasion at a friend's house, he met a young lady, who, on account of some misunderstanding with her relatives, had come to reside there. Her beauty seems to have made an indelible impression on his mind. From her rich Eastern look he always called her "Charmian," and wrote to his brother George, then in America, "When she comes into the room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a young leopardess." Her name, and the wildest reference to her, are constantly appearing in his correspondence, and towards the close of his life the remembrance of her love and beauty, and his inexorable disease, seems to have burned up his very existence. In the fierce alternations of passion, in failing health, and harassed by pecuniary difficulties, he was busily engaged in the study of Paradise Lost, filling his ear with the organ-music of Milton, and preparing his last volume for the press, containing his odes on the Nightingale and the Grecian Urn, the poems of Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and the fragment of Hyperion. In the midst of his labours he returned home late one night in a state of great excitement. He said he had been on the stage-coach, and had been chilled by the night air. He was persuaded to go to bed, but had scarcely laid down when he coughed, and said, "Bring me a candle." A light was brought, he looked at the dark stain on the white pillow for a few moments in silence, his surgeon's knowledge told him the fatal truth, he turned to his friend, and said calmly, "I know the colour of that blood, it is arterial blood, I cannot be deceived in that colour. That drop is my death-warrant, I must die." Getting rapidly worse, he was advised to winter in a more genial climate; and, in the autumn of 1820, Keats, accompanied by his friend Mr Severn the artist, whose name will be for ever famous in the annals of friendship, sailed for Italy. In the Bay of Biscay they experienced a severe storm, "Water parted from the sea," said Keats, as a wave deluged the cabin. When he reached Naples his sufferings were aggravated by a ten days' quarantine. Goaded by disease, and his own thoughts, he hurried to Rome, where every kindness and attention were shown him by Dr Clarke (now Sir James); and Mr Severn was never absent from his bedside day nor night. While at Rome, Keats suffered much from want of sleep, and would rave about his beloved friends in England, of the happy hours he spent in their society, but chiefly about her. Once, in a moment of good spirits, and when full of merry talk, he was seized with a paroxysm of coughing, and vomited a large quantity of blood. He never rallied after. One night he told his friend, he wished this inscription to be placed on his gravestone, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." On the 23d of February he started from sleep crying, "Severn—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy—don't be frightened—be firm and thank God it has come." He was lifted up, "the phlegm boiling in his throat," his agony shortly after decreased, and he died quietly as if in slumber. After his death his body was opened, his lungs were found completely gone, and his physicians expressed their surprise that he should have lived so long. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery. "Enough to make one in love with death," says Shelley, "to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." Many of the English residing in Rome at the time followed Keats to his grave.

After Chatterton, Keats is the most extraordinary phenomenon in our poetic literature; and, had life been granted him, there is reason to believe he would have taken his place in the very first rank of English poets. Misunderstood at the time, and supposed by many to be a sentimental weakling, oppressed by adverse circumstances, and bowed down by a mortal disease, his mind was of the noblest strain. His ambition was lofty, but he duly estimated his own powers and the difficulties he had to encounter; he shrunk from no labour, and gathered ardour from defeat. Those who are accustomed to consider him a poetical visionary—who turned from the realities of life to shed melodious tears over morning roses, and to fall into unnatural ecstasies at the sight of beautiful women, will be surprised to find in his letters warm human sympathies, practical sense, clear judgment, a considerable knowledge of mankind, and a healthy contempt of everything mean and degrading; they will see the sun of a strong intellect, rising out of the coloured mists of fancy and sentiment, consuming them in its path, and will be led to form the highest anticipations of the day which would have followed, had not the luminary been arrested by the hand of death just when it emerged full-orbed above them all.

The advance from Endymion to Hyperion, taking into consideration the shortness of the time in which it was accomplished,—about three years,—is without a parallel in our literary history. The glorious and uncultured profusion of the earlier poem is displeasing to a pure taste, from its very flush of colour and excess of sweetness. All form and outline are lost in the exuberance of ornament. In his latter poems, Hyperion especially, he had learned to husband his strength, and had acquired that last gift of the artist, to know where to stop. There is no excess, nothing extraneous, everything is clear and well-defined, as the naked limbs of an Apollo. He had overcome, too, the fopperies of style, the taste for conceits and fantastical diction so characteristic of the poets amongst whom he lived, and which so often marred the beauty of his earlier performances, and had gained a noble simplicity, and a pomp and depth of music which seems caught from the "far-flamed sea sands." One could hardly have expected that the florid and luscious fancies of Endymion should have ripened into the terrible power which gave us the picture of the fallen gods, stretched here and there on the flinty rocks, and veiled with everlasting twilight,

"Their clenched teeth still clenched, and all their limbs Locked like veins of metal cramped and screwed."

The same wonderful artistic sense is exhibited in the Eve of St Agnes. It is rich in colour as the stained windows of a Gothic cathedral, and every verse bursts into picturesque and graceful fancies; yet all this abundance is so subdued and harmonized in such wonderful keeping with the story Kedarnath and the mediæval period, as to render it a perfect chryso-lite—a precious gem of art. Perhaps the most exquisite specimen of Keats' poetry is the Ode to the Grecian Urn; it breathes the very spirit of antiquity,—eternal beauty and eternal repose.

In one of his letters, Keats gives utterance to the hope, that "after his death he would be among the English poets." This anticipation has been abundantly verified. Even in his lifetime the tide had turned in his favour. The late Lord Jeffrey, in 1820, after regretting that his attention had not been earlier turned to the book, remarks, that "Endymion is, in truth, at least as full of genius as absurdity;" and concludes, "We are very much inclined, indeed, to add, that we do not know any book which we would sooner employ as a test to ascertain whether anyone had in him a native relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm." With but one or two exceptions, no poet of the last generation stands at this moment higher in the popular estimation, and certainly no one has in a greater degree influenced the poetic development of the last thirty years.