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early age, whatever the reception of his poetry had been. Unfriendly criticism at the utmost only hastened his end. Certainly the criticism was very savage. Keats suffered from the same accidents in the literary situation as Shelley; he was a friend of Hunt's, and a Cockney, and a rebel against the traditions of Pope, and these facts intensified the bitterness of the Quarterly and Blackwood's. And his assailants had a taunt to level at him such as they could not use against the son of a baronet, connected by blood with some of the oldest noble families in England; "Johnny" Keats, as Blackwood's delighted to call him, had been a surgeon's apprentice, and was the son of a livery-stable keeper. Keats had too much manliness in him to have been much affected by the truculence of his critics if he had been a self-satisfied poet. But the effect was aggravated not only by ill health and pecuniary embarrassments, but by his profound dissatisfaction with his own. work. He said himself, and with every appearance of sincerity, that a sense of his shortcomings from the high ideal that he had set to himself gave him "pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict." "I have no cause to complain," he wrote. "I have no doubt that if I had written 'Othello' I should have been cheered. I shall go on with patience. . . I know nothing; I have read nothing; and I mean to follow Solomon's directions, 'get learning, get understanding.' There is but one. way for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it." These were the words of a young man of a very different fibre from the affected, mawkish, puling sentimentalist pictured by the critics of the time as the author of "Endymion." Keats had but a short lease of life before him when he wrote thus, but to the last he pursued earnestly his ideals of excellence, and the world has arrived at a very different measure of the worth of his performance

from that formed by himself on his death-bed, when he told his friend Severn to put on his gravestone the inscription: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

Keats is often coupled with Shelley as if they were poets of kindred genius. But the connection between them was purely accidental; beyond a certain profusion and fluency and richness of imagery they had little in common, as little as any two poets of the same generation. They both died young. They both died in Italy, and their monuments stand in the same cemetery at Rome. Both of them were cut off with much unfulfilled promise of great things. When Shelley's body was recovered, a copy of Keats's "Endymion" was found in his pocket. One of Shelley's few popular poems is the lament for Keats under the pastoral name of Adonais. These facts have associated the two poets in the general memory. But their aims in art were widely different. Keats had none of Shelley's fiery enthusiasm for humanity, and, although he had an ample share of the poet's peculiar gift of making new combinations, his combinations are more sensuous; they have not the subtle intellectual flavor of Shelley's. A poet of high rank is always his own best critic, and just as Shelley most truly characterized himself when he said that "his power consisted in sympathy and that part of imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation," so Keats most truly characterized himself when he said that his ruling principle was "a yearning passion for the beautiful." "I have loved the principle of beauty in all things," he wrote in his last days. I am inclined to think that Mr. Matthew Arnold, a critic with whose judgments I rarely find myself in dissent, makes a somewhat misleading remark when he insists that Keats's master passion was not the passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet, but was an intellectual or spiritual passion. If the words sensuous and sentimental

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were intended in an opprobrious sense, the remark might be useful; but if they are used in the literal meaning, and then contrasted with intellectual and spiritual, their tendency is to withdraw the reader of Keats from the main characteristics of his poetry. The beauty that Keats pursued, whether or not we call that beauty"truth," was loveliness

"In shape and hue and colour and sweet sound,"

to use the words of Shelley in the "Adonais." I imagine that Mr. Arnold's intention in drawing the distinction that I have quoted was to lay stress on the fact that the loveliness on which Keats's heart was set was not a meretricious loveliness, but a loveliness that was great and noble and pure. Still it was a sensuous loveliness in this meaning, that more than any other poet he aimed at and succeeded in depicting in words the beauty that painters put on canvas and sculptors chisel in marble. It is peculiarly easy to trace the main external influences that moulded Keats's poetry, because all his work was done in youth, when the enthusiastic admirations of the artist are most marked in endeavors to emulate what he admires. And it is a marked peculiarity of Keats's poetry that its most vital moulding influences came not from the work of previous poets, but from the sister arts of painting and sculpture. Impassioned admiration of Greek sculpture gave a more potent turn to Keats's poetry than any other external influence. Byron recognized this when he spoke of him as having

"without Greek

Contrived to talk about the gods of late

Much as they might have been supposed to speak."

We see this influence not merely in his famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where he deliberately seeks to interpret in words what the artist had sought to design

in visible lines, but all through his poems-in "Endymion," in "Hyperion," in the "Eve of St. Agnes," in "Lamia," in "Isabella." If we wonder what the surgeon's apprentice at Ealing could have known about Greek sculpture and ceramic art, we must remember that the Elgin Marbles were brought to this country and deposited at the British Museum when he was a boy. You know Byron's denunciation of the nobleman, with heart cold as the crags that guard his native coast, who had the shameless rapacity to plunder Athens of these masterpieces; but, looking impartially at the act and its results, we recognize that they have had a much more vital and suggestive influence on the mind of Europe in London than they would have had in Athens, and they have given us much of what is most precious in the poetry of Keats. One of Keats's friends was the painter Haydon, who records in his autobiography the intoxicating effect produced on him by his first sight of Greek sculpture. "Endymion " and "Hyperion "make it certain that Keats shared his friend's enthusiasm. Let the meaning sink into the mind, and you will see a succession of pictures executed in the spirit of Greek plastic art. In "Endymion " Keats seems always to have had a succession of pictures and sculptures before his mind's eye, and his poetry seems to be the interpretation of the impression he receives. The opening of "Hyperion," and also some of his other poems, such as the "Ode to the Nightingale" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," is like the description of a statue, with the repose and stillness of Greek sculpture, which is not a dead stillness, but motion instantaneously arrested.

SUPPLEMENT

I

MR. COURTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE

It is thirty-five years, as every reviewer has remarked, since the edition undertaken by John Wilson Croker and now completed by Mr. Courthope was announced; but the real beginning of the work that Mr. Courthope brings to a close may be said to date from the papers by Mr. Dilke, of which that announcement was the text. Mr. Dilke's discovery of the Caryll letters may be said to have opened a new chapter in the history of Pope's reputation. By this lucky find, followed up with amazing acuteness and patience, Mr. Dilke was able to clear up several incidents which had baffled all previous biographers; and his success and the piquancy of his discoveries gave an immense stimulus to research into the obscure particulars of Pope's life and the obscure allusions in his poetry. Pope's marvellous intellectual activity and ingenuity, and his persistent habit of mystification in every thing relating to himself, made his life and works the best possible field for the exercise of detective skill. By all this the edition now completed has profited. But for Mr. Dilke's researches, and the impulse they gave to investigation, it could never have been what it has become. Mr. Elwin, Mr. Courthope's predecessor, made the most ample acknowledgment of his debt to this enthusiastic volunteer from the outside; and now one of the main interests of the biography which it has fallen to Mr. Courthope to execute is to see