To say that these disgusting misrepresentations did not affect the consciousness and self-respect of Keats would be to underrate the sensitiveness of his nature.  He felt the insult, but more the injustice of the treatment he had received; he told me so, as we lay awake one night, when I slept in his brother’s bed.  They had injured him in the most wanton manner; but if they, or my Lord Byron, ever for one moment supposed that he was crushed or even cowed in spirit by the treatment he had received, never were they more deluded.  “Snuffed out by an article,” indeed!  He had infinitely more magnanimity, in its fullest sense, than that very spoiled, self-willed, and mean-souled man,—­and I have authority for the last term.  To say nothing of personal and private transactions, pages 204-207 in the first volume of Mr. Monckton Milnes’s life of our poet will be full authority for my estimate of his Lordship.  “Johnny Keats” had, indeed, “a little body with a mighty heart,” and he showed it in the best way:  not by fighting the ruffians,—­though he could have done that,—­but by the resolve that he would produce brain-work which not one of their party could approach; and he did.

In the year 1820 appeared the “Lamia,” “Isabella,” “Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Hyperion,” etc.  But, alas! the insidious disease which carried him off had made its approach, and he was going to, or had already departed for, Italy, attended by his constant and self-sacrificing friend, Severn.  Keats’s mother died of consumption; and he nursed his younger brother in the same disease, to the last,—­and, by so doing, in all probability, hastened his own summons.  Upon the publication of the last volume of poems, Charles Lamb wrote one of his own finely appreciative and cordial critiques in the “Morning Chronicle.”  This was sent to me in the country, where I had for some time resided.  I had not heard of the dangerous state of Keats’s health,—­only that he and Severn were going to Italy; it was, therefore, an unprepared shock which brought me the news that he had died in Rome.

Mr. Monckton Milnes has related the anecdote of Keats’s introduction to Wordsworth, with the latter’s appreciation of the “Hymn to Pan,” which its author had been desired to repeat, and the Rydal Mount poet’s snow-capped comment upon it,—­“Uhm! a pretty piece of Paganism!” Mr. Milnes, with his genial and placable nature, has made an amiable defence for the apparent coldness of Wordsworth’s appreciation,—­“That it was probably intended for some slight rebuke to his youthful compeer, whom he saw absorbed in an order of ideas that to him appeared merely sensuous, and would have desired that the bright traits of Greek mythology should be sobered down by a graver faith.”  Keats, like Shakspeare, and every other true poet, put his whole soul into what he imagined, portrayed, or embodied; and hence he appeared the young Greek, “suckled in that creed outworn.”  The wonder is, that Mr. Wordsworth forgot to quote himself.  From Keats’s