virtues, acquiesced by
saying amiably, 'Mr. Blank undoubtedly has genius, but he can't
spell;' yet there are comforting evidences that Keats was no servile
follower of the 'monster Conventionality' even in his spelling, while
in respect to the use of capitals he was a law unto himself. He
sprinkled them through his correspondence with a lavish hand, though
at times he grew so economical that, as one of his editors remarks, he
would spell Romeo with a small _r_, Irishman with a small _i_, and God
with a small _g_.

It is also a pleasure to find that, with his other failings, he had a
touch of book-madness. There was in him the making of a first-class
bibliophile. He speaks with rapture of his black-letter Chaucer, which
he proposes to have bound 'in Gothique,' so as to unmodernize as much
as possible its outward appearance. But to Keats books were literature
or they were not literature, and one cannot think that his affections
would twine about ever so bookish a volume which was merely 'curious.'

One reads with sympathetic amusement of Keats's genuine and natural
horror of paying the same bill twice, 'there not being a more
unpleasant thing in the world (saving a thousand and one others).' The
necessity of preserving adequate evidence that a bill had been paid
was uppermost in his thought quite frequently; and once when, at Leigh
Hunt's instance, sundry packages of papers belonging to that eminently
methodical and businesslike man of letters were to be sorted out and
in part destroyed, Keats refused to burn any, 'for fear of demolishing
receipts.'

But the reader will chance upon few more humorous passages than that
in which the poet tells his brother George how he cures himself of the
blues, and at the same time spurs his flagging powers of invention:
'Whenever I find myself growing vaporish I rouse myself, wash and put
on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings
neatly, and, in fact, adonize, as if I were going out--then all clean
and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the greatest
relief.' The virtues of a clean shirt have often been sung, but it
remained for Keats to show what a change of linen and a general
_adonizing_ could do in the way of furnishing poetic stimulus. This is
better than coffee, brandy, absinthe, or falling in love; and it
prompts one to think anew that the English poets, taking them as a
whole, were a marvelously healthy and sensible breed of men.

It is, howe