eally of so much value, in helping us to form any true
estimate of Keats's actual character, as Mr. Colvin seems to imagine. We
have no doubt that when Bailey wrote to Lord Houghton that common-sense
and gentleness were Keats's two special characteristics the worthy
Archdeacon meant extremely well, but we prefer the real Keats, with his
passionate wilfulness, his fantastic moods and his fine inconsistence.
Part of Keats's charm as a man is his fascinating incompleteness. We do
not want him reduced to a sand-paper smoothness or made perfect by the
addition of popular virtues. Still, if Mr. Colvin has not given us a
very true picture of Keats's character, he has certainly told the story
of his life in a pleasant and readable manner. He may not write with the
ease and grace of a man of letters, but he is never pretentious and not
often pedantic.

Mr. Rossetti's book is a great failure. To begin with, Mr. Rossetti
commits the great mistake of separating the man from the artist. The
facts of Keats's life are interesting only when they are shown in their
relation to his creative activity. The moment they are isolated they are
either uninteresting or painful. Mr. Rossetti complains that the early
part of Keats's life is uneventful and the latter part depressing, but
the fault lies with the biographer, not with the subject.

The book opens with a detailed account of Keats's life, in which he
spares us nothing, from what he calls the 'sexual misadventure at Oxford'
down to the six weeks' dissipation after the appearance of the Blackwood
article and the hysterical and morbid ravings of the dying man. No
doubt, most if not all of the things Mr. Rossetti tells us are facts; but
there is neither tact shown in the selection that is made of the facts
nor sympathy in the use to which they are put. When Mr. Rossetti writes
of the man he forgets the poet, and when he criticises the poet he shows
that he does not understand the man. His first error, as we have said,
is isolating the life from the work; his second error is his treatment of
the work itself. Take, for instance, his criticism of that wonderful Ode
to a Nightingale, with all its marvellous magic of music, colour and
form. He begins by saying that 'the first point of weakness' in the poem
is the 'surfeit of mythological allusions,' a statement which is
absolutely untrue, as out of the eight stanzas of the poem only three
contain any mythological allusions at all, a