Hunt, in his Autobiography, narrates as follows.  ’I had not known the young poet [Keats] long when Shelley and he became acquainted under my roof.  Keats did not take to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him.  Shelley’s only thoughts of his new acquaintance were such as regarded his bad health with which he sympathised [this about bad health seems properly to apply to a date later than the opening period when the two poets came together], and his poetry, of which he has left such a monument of his admiration as Adonais.  Keats, being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy.  Their styles in writing also were very different; and Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of Hyperion, was so far inferior in universality to his great acquaintance that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with Nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own hands [an allusion to the motto appended to Queen Mab].  I am bound to state thus much; because, hopeless of recovering his health, under circumstances that made the feeling extremely bitter, an irritable morbidity appears even to have driven his suspicions to excess; and this not only with regard to the acquaintance whom he might reasonably suppose to have had some advantages over him, but to myself, who had none; for I learned the other day with extreme pain ... that Keats, at one period of his intercourse with us, suspected both Shelley and myself of a wish to see him undervalued!  Such are the tricks which constant infelicity can play with the most noble natures.  For Shelley let Adonais answer.’  It is to be observed that Hunt is here rather putting the cart before the horse.  Keats (as we shall see immediately) suspected Shelley and Hunt ‘of a wish to see him undervalued’ as early as February 1818; but his ‘irritable morbidity’ when ’hopeless of recovering his health’ belongs to a later date, say the spring and summer of 1820.

It is said that in the spring of 1817 Shelley and Keats agreed that each of them would undertake an epic, to be written in a space of six months:  Shelley produced The Revolt of Islam (originally entitled Laon and Cythna), and Keats produced Endymion.  Shelley’s poem, the longer of the two, was completed by the early autumn, while Keats’s occupied him until the winter which opened 1818.  On 8th October, 1817, Keats wrote to a friend, ’I refused to visit Shelley, that I might have my own unfettered scope; meaning presumably that he wished to finish Endymion according to his own canons of taste and execution, without being hampered by any advice from Shelley.  There is also a letter from Keats to his two brothers, 22nd December, 1817, saying:  ’Shelley’s poem Laon and Cythna is out, and there are words about its being objected to as much as Queen