had practised in the poem itself and advocated in the preface. Many
passages in "Rimini" and in Keats' couplet poems anticipate, in their
easy flow, the relaxed versification of "The Earthly Paradise." This was
the Elizabethan type of heroic couplet, and its extreme instance is seen
in William Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" (1659). There is no proof of
Keats' alleged indebtedness to Chamberlayne, though he is known to have
been familiar with another specimen of the type, William Browne's
"Britannia's Pastorals." Hunt also confirmed Keats in the love of
Spenser, and introduced him to Ariosto whom he learned to read in the
Italian, five or six stanzas at a time. Dante he read in Cary's
translation, a copy of which was the only book that he took with him on
his Scotch trip. "The fifth canto of Dante," he wrote (March, 1819),
"pleases me more and more; it is that one in which he meets with Paulo
and Francesca." He afterwards dreamed of the story and wrote a sonnet
upon his dream, which Rossetti thought "by far the finest of Keats'
sonnets" next to that on Chapman's "Homer." [32] Mr. J. M. Robertson
thinks that the influence of Gary's "Dante" is visible in "Hyperion,"
especially in the recast version "Hyperion: A Vision." [33] And Leigh
Hunt suggests that in the lines in "The Eve of St. Agnes"--

"The sculptured dead on each side seem to freeze,
Emprisoned in black, purgatorial rails:
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries,
He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails
To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails"--

the germ of the thought is in Dante.[34] Keats wished that Italian
might take the place of French in English schools. To Hunt's example
was also due, in part, that fondness for neologisms for which the
latter apologises in the preface to "Rimini," and with which Keats was
wont to enrich his diction, as well as with Chattertonian archaisms,
Chapmanese compounds, "taffeta phrases, silken terms precise" from
Elizabethan English, and coinages like _poesied_, _jollying_,
_eye-earnestly_--licenses and affectations which gave dire offence to
Gifford and the classicals generally.

In the 1820 volume, which includes Keats' maturest work, there was a
story from the "Decameron," "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," which tells
how a lady exhumes the body of her murdered lover, cuts off the head and
buries it in a pot of sweet basil, which she keeps in her chamber and
waters with her tears. It was per