[1] The Poetical Works of John Keats. With a Memoir by Richard Monckton Milnes. A new Edition. 1863 (and other dates). See p. ix, Memoir.

[2] Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Edited by Richard Monckton Milnes (Two Volumes, Moxon, 1848). My references, throughout, are to this edition; but it will be sufficient to cite it henceforth simply as Life, Letters, &c., specifying the volume and page.

[3] The Poetical Works of John Keats. Chronologically arranged and edited, with a Memoir, by Lord Houghton, D.C.L., Hon. Fellow of Trin. Coll. Cambridge (Bell & Sons, 1876). See p. xxiii, Memoir.

[4] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, pp. 234-6.

[5] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, p. 240.

[6] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, pp. 252-3.

[7] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, p. 268, and Vol. II, p. 301. Should not the semicolon at point change places with the comma at knowledge?

[8] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, p. 270, and Vol. II, p. 302.

[9] This little book, now in my collection, is of great interest. It is marked throughout for Miss Brawne’s use,—according to Keats’s fashion of “marking the most beautiful passages” in his books for her. At one end is written the sonnet referred to in the text, apparently composed by Keats with the book before him, as there are two “false starts,” as well as erasures; and at the other end, in the handwriting of Miss Brawne, is copied Keats’s last sonnet,

The Spenser similarly marked, the subject of Letter XXXIV, is missing.

[10] See Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 35.

[11] The Philobiblion a monthly Bibliographical Journal. Containing Critical Notices of, and Extracts from, Rare, Curious, and Valuable Old Books. (Two Volumes. Geo. P. Philes & Co., 51 Nassau Street, New York. 1862-3.) The Keats letter is at p. 196 of Vol. I, side by side with one purporting to be Shelley’s, a flagrant forgery which has been publicly animadverted on several times lately, having been reprinted as genuine.

[12] The correspondent of The World would seem (I only say seem; for the matter is obscure) to have used Lord Houghton’s pages for “copy” where a cursory examination indicated that they gave the same matter as the original letter,—transcribing what presented itself as new matter from the original. The fragment of Friday 27th was, on this supposition, in its place when the copies were made for Lord Houghton, because there is the close; but between that time and 1862 it must have been separated from the letter.

[13] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 55.

[14] It is interesting, by the way, to extract the following note of locality from the Autobiography (Vol. II, p. 230): “It was not at Hampstead that I first saw Keats. It was in York-buildings, in the New-road (No. 8), where I wrote part of the Indicator; and he resided with me while in Mortimer-terrace, Kentish-town (No. 13), where I concluded it.”

[15] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 61.

[16] See Hunt’s Autobiography, Vol. II, p. 216. It may be noted in passing that the Indicator version of the Sonnet varies in some slight details from the Original in the volume of Dante referred to at page xliv, and from Lord Houghton’s text. It is natural to suppose that Hunt’s copy was the latest of the three; and his text is certainly an improvement on the others where it varies from them.

[17] The Papers of a Critic. Selected from the Writings of the late Charles Wentworth Dilke. With a Biographical Sketch by his Grandson, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Bart., M.P., &c. In Two Volumes. (London. John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1875.) See Vol. I, p. 11.

[18] This sonnet occurs at page 128 of The Garden of Florence; and other Poems. By John Hamilton. (London: John Warren, Old Bond-street. 1821.)

[19] The Letters and Poems of John Keats. In three volumes. (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1883). Vol. I is called The Letters of John Keats, edited by Jno. Gilmer Speed: Vol. II and III, The Poems of John Keats, with the Annotations of Lord Houghton and a Memoir by Jno. Gilmer Speed.

[20] Keats by Sidney Colvin. (Macmillan & Co., 1887). Mr. Colvin has also contributed to Macmillan’s Magazine (August, 1888) an Article On Some Letters of Keats, which I have also duly consulted.

[21] The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats, (Four volumes, Reeves & Turner, 1883, considerably earlier than Mr. Speed’s volumes appeared.)

[22] Charlotte, Mr. Colvin calls her; but her name was Jane.

[23] These two words are wanting in the original.

[24] His brother, “poor Tom,” had died about seven months before the date of this letter.

[25]

[26] Fanny’s younger sister: see Introduction.

[27] The word Newport is not stamped on this letter, as on Numbers I, II, and IV; but it is pretty evident that Keats and his friend were still at Shanklin.

[28] I am not aware of any other published record that this name belonged to Keats’s Mother, as well as his sister and his betrothed.

[29] Samuel Brawne, the brother of Fanny: see Introduction.

[30] I am unable to obtain or suggest any explanation of the allusion made in this strange sentence. It is not, however, impossible that “the Bishop” was merely a nickname of some one in the Hampstead circle.

[31] The Tragedy referred to is, of course, Otho the Great, which was composed jointly by Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown. For the first four acts Brown provided the characters, plot, &c., and Keats found the language; but the fifth act is wholly Keats’s. See Lord Houghton’s Life, Letters, &c. (1848), Vol. II, pp. 1 and 2, and foot-note at p. 333 of the Aldine edition of Keats’s Poetical Works (Bell & Sons, 1876). A humorous account of the progress of the joint composition occurs in a letter written by Brown to Dilke, which is quoted at p. 9 of the memoir prefixed by Sir Charles Dilke to The Papers of a Critic, referred to in the Introduction to the present volume, p. lviii.

[32] He did not find one; for, in a letter to B. R. Haydon, dated Winchester, 3 October, 1819, he says: “I came to this place in the hopes of meeting with a Library, but was disappointed.” For this letter see Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk (Two volumes, Chatto and Windus, 1875), Vol. II, p. 16, and also Lord Houghton’s Life, Letters, &c. (1848), Vol. II, p. 10, where there is an extract from the letter somewhat differently worded and arranged.

[33] The discrepancy between the date written by Keats and that given in the postmark is curious as a comment on his statement (Life, Letters, &c., 1848, Vol. I, p. 253) that he never knew the date: “It is some days since I wrote the last page, but I never know....”

[34] This word is of course left as found in the original letter: an editor who should spell it yacht would be guilty of representing Keats as thinking what he did not think.

[35] Written, I presume, from the house of his friends and publishers, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, No. 93, Fleet Street.

[36] Whether he carried out this intention to the letter, I know not; but he would seem to have been at Winchester again, at all events, by the 22nd of September, on which day he was writing thence to Reynolds (Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 23).

[37] It would seem to have been in this street that Mr. Dilke obtained for Keats the rooms which the poet asked him to find in the letter of the 1st of October, from Winchester, given at p. 16, Vol. II, of the Life, Letters, &c. (1848). How long Keats remained in those rooms I have been unable to determine, to a day; but in Letter No. IX he writes, eight days later, from Great Smith Street (the address of Mr. Dilke) that he purposes “living at Hampstead”; and there is a letter headed “Wentworth Place, Hampstead, 17th Nov. [1819.]” at p. 35, Vol. II, of the Life, Letters, &c.

[38] It may be that consideration for his correspondent induced this moderation of speech: presumably the scene here referred to is that so graphically given in Lord Houghton’s Life (Vol. II, pp. 53-4), where we read, not that he merely “felt it possible” he “might not survive,” but that he said to his friend, “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.”

[39] This sentence indicates the lapse of perhaps about a week from the 3rd of February, 1820.

[40] This coupling of Brown’s name with ideas of Fanny’s absence or presence seems to be a curiously faint indication of a painful phase of feeling more fully developed in the sequel. See Letters XXI, XXIV, XXVI, XXXV, and XXXVII.

[41] If we are to take these words literally, this letter brings us to the 24th of February, 1820, adopting the 3rd of February as the day on which Keats broke a blood-vessel.

[42] George Keats’s Mother-in-law. The significant but indicates that the absence of Brown was still, as was natural, more or less a condition of the presence of Miss Brawne. That Keats had, however, or thought he had, some reason for this condition, beyond the mere delicacy of lovers, is dimly shadowed by the cold My dear Fanny with which in Letter XXI the condition was first expressly prescribed, and more than shadowed by the agonized expression of a morbid sensibility in Letters XXXV and XXXVII. Probably a man in sound health would have found the cause trivial enough.

[43] The MS. of Lamia, Isabella, &c. (the volume containing Hyperion, and most of Keats’s finest work).

[44] I presume the reference is to Mr. Dilke.

[45] This statement and a general similarity of tone induce the belief that this letter and the preceding one were written about the same time as one to Mr. Dilke, given by Lord Houghton (in the Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 57), as bearing the postmark, “Hampstead, March 4, 1820.” In that letter Keats cites his friend Brown as having said that he had “picked up a little flesh,” and he refers to his “being under an interdict with respect to animal food, living upon pseudo-victuals,”—just as in Letter XXV he speaks to Miss Brawne of his “feeding upon sham victuals.” In the letter to Dilke he says: “If I can keep off inflammation for the next six weeks, I trust I shall do very well.” In Letter XXV he expresses to Miss Brawne the hope that he may go out for a walk with her on the 1st of May. If these correspondences may be trusted, we are now dealing with letters of the first week in March, of which period there are still indications in Letter XXVIII.

[46] The reference to Barry Cornwall and the cold weather indicate that this letter was written about the 4th of March, 1820; for in the letter to Mr. Dilke, with the Hampstead postmark of that date, already referred to (see page 73), Keats recounts this same affair of the books evidently as a quite recent transaction, and says he “shall not expect Mrs. Dilke at Hampstead next week unless the weather changes for the warmer.”

[47] Misspelt Proctor in the original.

[48] It is of no real consequence what had been said about “old Mr. Dilke,” the grandfather of the first baronet and the father of Keats’s acquaintance; but it is to be noted that this curious letter might have been a little more self-explanatory, had it not been mutilated. The lower half of the second leaf has been cut off,—by whom, the owners can only conjecture.

[49] The piece cut off the original letter is in this instance so small that nothing can be wanting except the signature,—probably given to an autograph-collector.

[50] This extreme bitterness of feeling must have supervened, one would think, in increased bodily disease; for the letter was clearly written after the parting of Keats and Brown at Gravesend, which took place on the 7th of May, 1819, and on which occasion there is every reason to think that the friends were undivided in attachment. I imagine Keats would gladly have seen Brown within a week of this time had there been any opportunity.

[51] This question may perhaps be fairly taken to indicate the lapse of a month from the time when Keats left the house at Hampstead next door to Miss Brawne’s, at which he probably knew her employments well enough from day to day. If so, the time would be about the first week in June, 1819.

[52] He was seemingly in a different phase of belief from that in which the death of his brother Tom found him. At that time he recorded that he and Tom both firmly believed in immortality. See Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, p. 246. A further indication of his having shifted from the moorings of orthodoxy may be found in the expression in Letter XXXV, “I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in:”—not “we believe in.”

[53] This seems to mean that he wrote the letter to the end, and then filled in the words My dearest Girl, left out lest any one coming near him should chance to see them. These words are written more heavily than the beginning of the letter, and indicate a state of pen corresponding with that shown by the words God bless you at the end.

[54] This letter appears to belong between those of the 8th and 25th of July, 1819; and of the two Thursdays between these dates it seems likelier that the 15th would be the one than that the letter should have been written so near the 25th as on the 22nd. The original having been mislaid, I have not been able to take the evidence of the postmark. It will be noticed that at the close he speaks of a weekly exchange of letters with Miss Brawne; and by placing this letter at the 15th this programme is pretty nearly realized so far as Keats’s letters from the Isle of Wight are concerned.

[55] The story in question is one of the many derivatives from the Third Calender’s Story in The Thousand and One Nights and the somewhat similar tale of “The Man who laughed not,” included in the Notes to Lane’s Arabian Nights and in the text of Payne’s magnificent version of the complete work. I am indebted to Dr. Reinhold KÖhler, Librarian of the Grand-ducal Library of Weimar, for identifying the particular variant referred to by Keats as the “Histoire de la Corbeille,” in the Nouveaux Contes Orientaux of the Comte de Caylus. Mr. Morris’s beautiful poem “The Man who never laughed again,” in The Earthly Paradise, has familiarized to English readers one variant of the legend.

[56] It will of course be remembered that no such collection appeared until the following summer, when the Lamia volume was published.

[57] I do not find in the present series any letter which I can regard as the particular one referred to in the opening sentence. If Letter XXXV (p. 93) were headed Tuesday and this Wednesday, that might well be the peccant document which appears to be missing.

[58] The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. In Two Volumes. London: 1847 (see Vol. II, pp. 86-93).

[59] It appeared in No. XXXVII, headed “April, 1818,” on page 1, but described on the wrapper as “published in September, 1818.”

[60] See p. liii: it was the 3rd of February, 1820.

[61] See Letter XIII, pp. 49-50.

[62] See Letter XVII, pp. 57-8.

[63] The Northern Heights of London or Historical Associations of Hampstead, Highgate, Muswell Hill, Hornsey, and Islington. By William Howitt, author of ‘Visits to Remarkable Places.’ (London: Longmans, Green, & Co. 1869.)

[64] Handbook to the Environs of London, Alphabetically Arranged, containing an account of every town and village, and of all the places of interest, within a circle of twenty miles round London. By James Thorne, F.S.A. In Two Parts. (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1876.)

[65] She first appeared upon the London boards in 1822, and afterwards became “Private Reader” to George IV.