Hospital, and Keats became intimate with the whole family, though not
invariably well pleased with them all. One of the sisters married Thomas
Hood. Through Reynolds Keats made acquaintance with Mr. Benjamin Bailey,
born towards 1794, then a student at Oxford reading for the Church,
afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo in Ceylon. Charles Wentworth Dilke,
born in 1789, the critic, and eventually editor of _The Athenaeum_, was
another intimate; and in course of time Keats knew Charles Wells, seven
years younger than himself, the author of the dramatic poem "Joseph and
his Brethren," and of the prose "Stories after Nature." Other friends
will receive mention as we progress. I have for the present said enough
to indicate what was the particular niche in the mansion of English
literary life in which Keats found himself housed at the opening of his
career.

CHAPTER II.

We have now reached the year 1817 and the month of May, when Keats was
in the twenty-second year of his age. He then wrote that he had
"forgotten all surgery," and was beginning at Margate his romantic epic
of "Endymion," reading and writing about eight hours a day. Keats had
previously been at Carisbrooke in the Isle of Wight, but had run away
from there, finding that the locality, while it charmed, also depressed
him. He had left London for the island, apparently with the view of
having greater leisure for study and composition. His brother Tom was
with him at Carisbrooke and at Margate. He was already provided with a
firm of publishers, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, willing to undertake the
risk of "Endymion," and they advanced him a sum sufficient for
continuing at work on it with comfort. In September he went with Mr.
Benjamin Bailey to Oxford: they made an excursion to Stratford-on-Avon,
and Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of the month. It would appear
that in Oxford Keats, in the heat of youthful blood, committed an
indiscretion of which we do not know the details, nor need we give them
if we knew them; for on the 8th of October he wrote to Bailey in these
terms: "The little mercury I have taken has corrected the poison and
improved my health,[3] though I feel, from my employment, that I shall
never again be secure in robustness." The residence of Keats and his
brother Tom in Hampstead, a first-floor lodging, was in Well Walk, No.
1, next to the Wells Tavern, which was then called the Green Man. The
reader who has a head for localities should