uite the
little poet;' how he sat in a hatter's shop in the Poultry while Mr.
Abbey read him some extracts from Lord Byron's 'last flash poem,' _Don
Juan_; how some beef was carved exactly to suit his appetite, as if he
'had been measured for it;' how he dined with Horace Smith and his
brothers and some other young gentlemen of fashion, and thought them
all hopelessly affected; in a word, almost anything you want to know
about John Keats can be found in these letters. They are of more value
than all the 'recollections' of all his friends put together. In their
breezy good-nature and cheerfulness they are a fine antidote to the
impression one gets of him in Haydon's account, 'lying in a white bed
with a book, hectic and on his back, irritable at his weakness and
wounded at the way he had been used. He seemed to be going out of life
with a contempt for this world, and no hopes of the other. I told him
to be calm, but he muttered that if he did not soon get better he
would destroy himself.' This is taking Keats at his worst. It is well
enough to know that he seemed to Haydon as Haydon has described him,
but few men appear to advantage when they are desperately ill. Turn to
the letters written during his tour in Scotland, when he walked twenty
miles a day, climbed Ben Nevis, so fatigued himself that, as he told
Fanny Keats, 'when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe
and trundle me around the town, like a Hoop, without waking me. Then I
get so hungry a Ham goes but a very little way, and fowls are like
Larks to me.... I take a whole string of Pork Sausages down as easily
as a Pen'orth of Lady's fingers.' And then he bewails the fact that
when he arrives in the Highlands he will have to be contented 'with an
acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of Milk, and a Cloaths basket of
Eggs morning, noon, and night.' Here is the active Keats, of honest
mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens' to cut all
sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut Sickness.'

Indeed, the letters are so pleasant and amusing in the way they
exhibit minor traits, habits, prejudices, and the like, that it is a
temptation to dwell upon these things. How we love a man's
weaknesses--if we share them! I do not know that Keats would have
given occasion for an anecdote like that told of a certain book-loving
actor, whose best friend, when urged to join the chorus of praise that
was quite universally sung to this actor's