Peripatetic signifying to his pupil,—­“My eyes!  Bill Soames giv’ me sich a licker!”—­evidently grateful, and considering himself complimented, upon being included in the general dispensation.  Keats’s entertainment with this minor scene of low life has often recurred to me.  But his subsequent description of the baiting, with his position, of his legs and arms bent and shortened, till he looked like Bruin on his hind-legs, dabbing his fore-paws hither and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and hugged, his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a memorable display.  I am never reminded of this amusing relation, but it is associated with that forcible picture in Shakspeare, (and what subject can we not associate with him?) in the “Henry VI":—­

  “as a bear encompassed round with dogs,
  Who having pinched a few and made them cry,
  The rest stand all aloof and bark at him.”

Keats also attended a prize-fight between two of the most skilful and enduring “light-weights,”—­Randal and Turner.  It was, I believe, at that remarkable wager, when, the men being so equally matched and accomplished, they had been sparring for three-quarters of an hour before a blow had been struck.  In describing the rapidity of Randal’s blows while the other was falling, Keats tapped his fingers on the window-pane.

I make no apology for recording these events in his life; they are characteristics of the natural man,—­and prove, moreover, that the indulgence in such exhibitions did not for one moment blunt the gentler emotions of his heart, or vulgarize his inborn love of all that was beautiful and true.  His own line was the axiom of his moral existence, his political creed:—­“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”; and I can fancy no coarser consociation able to win him from this faith.  Had he been born in squalor, he would have emerged a gentleman.  Keats was not an easily swayable man; in differing with those he loved, his firmness kept equal pace with the sweetness of his persuasion; but with the rough and the unlovable he kept no terms,—­within the conventional precincts, I mean, of social order.

From Well Walk he moved to another quarter of the Heath,—­Wentworth Place the name, if I recollect.  Here he became a sharing inmate with Mr. Charles Armitage Brown, a gentleman who had been a Russia merchant, and had retired to a literary leisure upon an independence.  I do not know how they became acquainted; but Keats never had a more zealous, a firmer, or more practical friend and adviser than Brown.  His robust eagerness and zeal, with a headstrong determination of will, led him into an undue prejudice against the brother, George, respecting some money-transactions with John, which, however, the former redeemed to the perfect satisfaction of all the friends of the family.  After the death of Keats, Armitage Brown went to reside