me acquaintance
with Shakespeare, as he told a younger schoolfellow that he thought no
one durst read "Macbeth" alone in the house at two in the morning. Not
indeed that these bookish leanings formed the whole of his personality
as a schoolboy. He was noticeable for beauty of face and expression,
active and energetic, intensely pugnacious, and even quarrelsome. He was
very apt to get into a fight with boys much bigger than himself. Nor was
his younger brother George exempted: John would fight fiercely with
George, and this (if we may trust George's testimony) was always owing
to John's own unmanageable temper. The two brothers were none the less
greatly attached, both at school and afterwards. The youngest brother,
Thomas (always called Tom in family records), is reported to have been
as pugilistic as John; whereas George, when allowed his own way, was
pacific, albeit resolute. The ideal of all the three boys was a maternal
uncle, a naval officer of very stalwart presence, who had been in
Admiral Duncan's ship in the famous action off Camperdown; where he had
distinguished himself not only by signal gallantry, but by not getting
shot, though his tall form was a continual mark for hostile guns.

While still a schoolboy at Enfield, John Keats lost both his parents.
The father died on the 16th of April 1804, in returning from a visit to
the school: a detail which serves to show us (for I do not find it
otherwise affirmed) that John could at the utmost have been only in the
ninth year of his age, possibly even younger, when his schooling began.
On leaving Enfield, the father dined at Southgate, and, going late
homewards, his horse fell in the City Road, and the rider's skull was
fractured. He was found about one o'clock in the morning speechless, and
expired towards eight, aged thirty-six. The mother suffered from
rheumatism, and later on from consumption; of which she died in February
1810. "John," so writes Haydon, "sat up whole nights with her in a great
chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine or even cook her food
but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease." She had
been an easily consoled widow, for, within a year from the decease of
her first husband, she married another, William Rawlings, who had
probably succeeded to the management of the business. She soon, however,
separated from Rawlings, and lived with her mother at Edmonton. After
her death Keats hid himself for some days in a nook unde