  Abbey, Mr Richard, 11, 17, 70, 77, 138, 144, 192. English Men of Letters. Edited by JOHN MORLEY. Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. Paper Covers, 1s.; Cloth, 1s. 6d. each. Pocket Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth. 1s. net each. Library Edition. Crown 8vo. Gilt tops. Flat backs. 2s. net each.
English Men of Letters. NEW SERIES. Crown 8vo. Gilt tops. Flat backs. 2s. net each. MATTHEW ARNOLD. By Herbert W. Paul. JANE AUSTEN. By F. Warre Cornish. SIR THOMAS BROWNE. By Edmund Gosse. BROWNING. By G. K. Chesterton. FANNY BURNEY. By Austin Dobson. CRABBE. By Alfred Ainger. MARIA EDGEWORTH. By the Hon. Emily Lawless. GEORGE ELIOT. By Sir Leslie Stephen, K.C.B. EDWARD FITZGERALD. By A. C. Benson. HAZLITT. By Augustine Birrell, K.C. HOBBES. By Sir Leslie Stephen, K.C.B. ANDREW MARVELL. By Augustine Birrell, K.C. THOMAS MOORE. By Stephen Gwynn. WILLIAM MORRIS. By Alfred Noyes. WALTER PATER. By A. C. Benson. RICHARDSON. By Austin Dobson. ROSSETTI. By A. C. Benson. RUSKIN. By Frederic Harrison. SHAKESPEARE. By Walter Raleigh. ADAM SMITH. By Francis W. Hirst. SYDNEY SMITH. By George W. E. Russell. JEREMY TAYLOR. By Edmund Gosse. TENNYSON. By Sir Alfred Lyall. JAMES THOMSON. By G. C. Macaulay. In preparation. MRS. GASKELL. By Clement Shorter. BEN JONSON. By Prof. Gregory Smith. MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON. Footnotes: [2] Ibid. [3] John Jennings died March 8, 1805. [4] Rawlings v. Jennings. See below, p. 138, and Appendix, p. 221. [5] Captain Jennings died October 8, 1808. [6] Houghton MSS. [7] Rawlings v. Jennings. See Appendix, p. 221. [8] Mrs Alice Jennings was buried at St Stephen’s, Coleman Street, December 19, 1814, aged 78. (Communication from the Rev. J. W. Pratt, M.A.) [9] I owe this anecdote to Mr Gosse, who had it direct from Horne. [10] Houghton MSS. [11] A specimen of such scribble, in the shape of a fragment of romance narrative, composed in the sham Old-English of Rowley, and in prose, not verse, will be found in The Philosophy of Mystery, by W. C. Dendy (London, 1841), p. 99, and another, preserved by Mr H. Stephens, in the Poetical Works, ed. Forman (1 vol. 1884), p. 558. [13] See C. L. Feltoe, Memorials of J. F. South (London, 1884), p. 81. [14] Houghton MSS. See also Dr B. W. Richardson in the Asclepiad, vol. i. p. 134. [15] Houghton MSS. [16] What, for instance, can be less Spenserian and at the same time less Byronic than— “For sure so fair a place was never seen [19] See particularly the Invocation to Sleep in the little volume of Webb’s poems published by the Olliers in 1821. [21] See Praeterita, vol. ii. chap. 2. [23] Compare Chapman, Hymn to Pan:— “the bright-hair’d god of pastoral, [24] Compare Wordsworth:— “Bees that soar for bloom, Is the line of Keats an echo or merely a coincidence? [25] Mr W. T. Arnold in his Introduction (p. xxvii) quotes a parallel passage from Leigh Hunt’s Gentle Armour as an example of the degree to which Keats was at this time indebted to Hunt: forgetting that the Gentle Armour was not written till 1831, and that the debt in this instance is therefore the other way. [27] The facts and dates relating to Brown in the above paragraph were furnished by his son, still living in New Zealand, to Mr Leslie Stephen, from whom I have them. The point about the Adventures of a Younger Son is confirmed by the fact that the mottoes in that work are mostly taken from the Keats MSS. then in Brown’s hands, especially Otho. [28] Houghton MSS. [32] In the extract I have modernized Drayton’s spelling and endeavoured to mend his punctuation: his grammatical constructions are past mending. [33] Mrs Owen was, I think, certainly right in her main conception of an allegoric purpose vaguely underlying Keats’s narrative. [34] Lempriere (after Pausanias) mentions PÆon as one of the fifty sons of Endymion (in the Elean version of the myth): and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene there is a PÆana—the daughter of the giant Corflambo in the fourth book. Keats probably had both of these in mind when he gave Endymion a sister and called her Peona. [35] Book 1, Song 4. The point about Browne has been made by Mr W. T. Arnold. [36] The following is a fair and characteristic enough specimen of Chamberlayne:— “Upon the throne, in such a glorious state [38] Houghton MSS. [40] Severn in Houghton MSS. [41] Houghton MSS. [42] Dilke (in a MS. note to his copy of Lord Houghton’s Life and Letters, ed. 1848) states positively that Lockhart afterwards owned as much; and there are tricks of style, e.g. the use of the Spanish Sangrado for doctor, which seem distinctly to betray his hand. [43] Leigh Hunt at first believed that Scott himself was the writer, and Haydon to the last fancied it was Scott’s faithful satellite, the actor Terry. [44] Severn in the Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., p. 401. [47] Houghton MSS. [48] The house is now known as Lawn Bank, the two blocks having been thrown into one, with certain alterations and additions which in the summer of 1885 were pointed out to me in detail by Mr William Dilke, the then surviving brother of Keats’s friend. [51] Decamerone, Giorn., iv. nov. 5. A very different metrical treatment of the same subject was attempted and published, almost simultaneously with that of Keats, by Barry Cornwall in his Sicilian Story (1820). Of the metrical tales from Boccaccio which Reynolds had agreed to write concurrently with Keats (see above, p. 86), two were finished and published by him after Keats’s death in the volume called A Garden of Florence (1821). [52] As to the date when Hyperion was written, see Appendix, p. 228: and as to the error by which Keats’s later recast of his work has been taken for an earlier draft, ibid., p. 230. [53] If we want to see Greek themes treated in a Greek manner by predecessors or contemporaries of Keats, we can do so—though only on a cameo scale—in the best idyls of ChÉnier in France, as L’Aveugle or Le Jeune Malade, or of Landor in England, as the Hamadryad or Enallos and Cymodamia; poems which would hardly have been written otherwise at Alexandria in the days of Theocritus. [54] We are not surprised to hear of Keats, with his instinct for the best, that what he most liked in Chatterton’s work was the minstrel’s song in Ælla, that fantasia, so to speak, executed really with genius on the theme of one of Ophelia’s songs in Hamlet. [55] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the deaths of the beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of rhyme. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the beadsman in the lines, “But no—already had his death-bell rung; that of Angela where she calls herself “A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, [57] Chartier was born at Bayeux. His Belle Dame sans Merci is a poem of over eighty stanzas, the introduction in narrative and the rest in dialogue, setting forth the obduracy shown by a lady to her wooer, and his consequent despair and death.—For the date of composition of Keats’s poem, see Appendix, p. 230. [58] This has been pointed out by my colleague Mr A. S. Murray: see Forman, Works, vol. iii. p. 115, note; and W. T. Arnold, Poetical Works, &c., p. xxii, note. [59] Houghton MSS. [60] “He never spoke of any one,” says Severn, (Houghton MSS.,) “but by saying something in their favour, and this always so agreeably and cleverly, imitating the manner to increase your favourable impression of the person he was speaking of.” [62] Auctores Mythographi Latini, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742. Keats’s copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed after his death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon Bailey (Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which had wrought in Keats’s mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus. [63] Mrs Owen was the first of Keats’s critics to call attention to this passage, without, however, understanding the special significance it derives from the date of its composition. [64] Houghton MSS. [65] See below, p. 193, note 2. [66] “Interrupted,” says Brown oracularly in Houghton MSS., “by a circumstance which it is needless to mention.” [67] This passing phrase of Brown, who lived with Keats in the closest daily companionship, by itself sufficiently refutes certain statements of Haydon. But see Appendix, p. 232. [68] A week or two later Leigh Hunt printed in the Indicator a few stanzas from the Cap and Bells, and about the same time dedicated to Keats his translation of Tasso’s Amyntas, speaking of the original as “an early work of a celebrated poet whose fate it was to be equally pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical.” [69] See Crabb Robinson. Diaries, Vol. II. p. 197, etc. [71] Houghton MSS. In both the Autobiography and the Correspondence the passage is amplified with painful and probably not trustworthy additions. [72] I have the date of sailing from Lloyd’s, through the kindness of the secretary, Col. Hozier. For the particulars of the voyage and the time following it, I have drawn in almost equal degrees from the materials published by Lord Houghton, by Mr Forman, by Severn himself in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI. p. 401, and from the unpublished Houghton and Severn MSS. [73] Severn, as most readers will remember, died at Rome in 1879, and his remains were in 1882 removed from their original burying-place to a grave beside those of Keats in the Protestant cemetery near the pyramid of Gaius Cestius. [74] Haslam, in Severn MSS. [75] Severn MSS. [76] Houghton MSS. [77] Ibid. [78] Houghton MSS. [79] Ibid. |
|
