did not show any remarkable
talent at school, but learned easily, and was 'a very orderly scholar,'
acquiring a fair amount of Latin but no Greek. He was active,
pugnacious, and popular among his school-fellows. The father died of a
fall from his horse in April, 1804: the mother, after re-marrying,
succumbed to consumption in February, 1810. Before the close of the same
year John left school, and he was then apprenticed, to a surgeon at
Edmonton. In July, 1815, he passed with credit the examination at
Apothecaries' Hall.

In 1812 Keats read for the first time Spenser's _Faery Queen_, and was
fascinated with it to a singular degree. This and other poetic reading
made him flag in his surgical profession, and finally he dropped it, and
for the remainder of his life had no definite occupation save that of
writing verse. From his grandparents he inherited a certain moderate sum
of money--not more than sufficient to give him a tolerable start in
life. He made acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, then editor of the
_Examiner_, John Hunt, the publisher, Charles Wentworth Dilke who became
editor of the _Athenaeum_, the painter Haydon, and others. His first
volume of Poems (memorable for little else than the sonnet _On Reading
Chapman's Homer_) was published in 1817. It was followed by _Endymion_
in April, 1818.

In June of the same year Keats set off with his chief intimate, Charles
Armitage Brown (a retired Russia merchant who afterwards wrote a book on
Shakespeare's Sonnets), on a pedestrian tour in Scotland, which extended
into North Ireland as well. In July, in the Isle of Mull, he got a bad
sore throat, of which some symptoms had appeared also in earlier years:
it may be regarded as the beginning of his fatal malady. He cut short
his tour and returned to Hampstead, where he had to nurse his younger
brother Tom, a consumptive invalid, who died in December of the same
year.

At the house of the Dilkes, in the autumn of 1818, Keats made the
acquaintance of Miss Fanny Brawne, the orphan daughter of a gentleman of
independent means: he was soon desperately in love with her, having 'a
swooning admiration of her beauty:' towards the spring of 1819 they
engaged to marry, with the prospect of a long engagement. On the night
of 3 February, 1820, on returning to the house at Hampstead which he
shared with Mr. Brown, the poet had his first attack, a violent one, of
blood-spitting from the lungs. He rallied somewhat, but suffered a
danger