have it that this rabbit was the spirit
of Tom, and he persisted in the fancy with not a little earnestness.

Of Keats's fondness for wine--his appreciation of it as a flavour
grateful to the palate, and to the abstract sense of enjoyment--there
are numerous traces throughout his writings. We all remember the famous
lines in his "Ode to a Nightingale"--

"Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,...
Oh for a beaker full of the warm South!" &c.--

lines which seem a little forced into their context, and of which the
only tangible meaning there is that the luxury and dreamy inspiration of
wine-drinking would relieve the poet's mind from the dull and painful
realities of life, and assist his imagination into the dim vocal haunts
of the nightingale. There is also in "Lamia" a conspicuous passage
celebrating "The happy vintage--merry wine, sweet wine." On claret--as
to which we have heard the evidence of Haydon--there is a long tirade in
a letter addressed to George Keats and his wife in February 1819. I give
it in a condensed form:--

"I never drink above three glasses of wine, and never any
spirits and water.... How I like claret! When I can get claret, I
must drink it. 'Tis the only palate affair that I am at all
sensual in.... It fills one's mouth with a gushing
freshness--then goes down cool and feverless: then you do not
feel it quarrelling with one's liver.... Other wines of a heavy
and spirituous nature transform a man into a Silenus: this makes
him a Hermes, and gives a woman the soul and immortality of an
Ariadne.... I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I
have: I forgot game. I must plead guilty to the breast of a
partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing
and side of a pheasant, and a woodcock _passim_."

At a rather later date, October 1819, Keats had "left off animal food,
that my brains may never henceforth be in a greater mist than is theirs
by nature." But I presume this form of abstinence did not last long.

I have now gone through the principal points which appear to me to
identify Keats as a man, and to throw light upon his character and
habits. He entered on life high-spirited, ardent, impulsive, vehement;
with plenty of self-confidence, ballasted with a large capacity (though
he did not always exercise it to a practical result) for self-criticism;
longing to be a poet,