I can attribute some of the pleasantest and most valuable associations of my after-life, as it included almost the whole society of gifted young men at that time called “Young England.”  Here I may allude to the extraordinary change I now observed in the manners and morals of Englishmen generally:  the foppish love of dress was in a great measure abandoned, and all intellectual pursuits were caught up with avidity, and even made fashionable.

The most remarkable example of the strange capriciousness of Keats’s fame which fell under my personal observation occurred in my later Roman years, during the painful visit of Sir Walter Scott to Rome in the winding-up days of his eventful life, when he was broken down not only by incurable illness and premature old age, but also by the accumulated misfortunes of fatal speculations and the heavy responsibility of making up all with the pen then trembling in his failing hand.

I had been indirectly made known to him by his favorite ward and protegee, the late Lady Northampton, who, accustomed to write to him monthly, often made mention of me; for I was on terms of friendship with all her family, an intimacy which in great part arose from the delight she always had in Keats’s poetry, being herself a poetess, and a most enlightened and liberal critic.

When Sir Walter arrived, he received me like an old and attached friend; indeed, he involuntarily tried to make me fill up the terrible void then recently created by the death of Lady Northampton at the age of thirty-seven years.  I went at his request to breakfast with him every morning, when he invariably commenced talking of his lost friend, of her beauty, her singularly varied accomplishments, of his growing delight in watching her from a child in the Island of Mull, and of his making her so often the model of his most successful female characters, the Lady of the Lake and Flora MacIvor particularly.  Then he would stop short to lament her unlooked-for death with tears and groans of bitterness such as I had never before witnessed in any one,—­his head sinking down on his heaving breast.  When he revived, (and this agonizing scene took place every morning,) he implored me to pity him, and not heed his weakness,—­that in his great misfortunes, in all their complications, he had looked forward to Rome and his dear Lady Northampton as his last and certain hope of repose; she was to be his comfort in the winding-up of life’s pilgrimage:  now, on his arrival, his life and fortune almost exhausted, she was gone! gone! After these pathetic outpourings, he would gradually recover his old cheerfulness, his expressive gray eye would sparkle even in tears, and soon that wonderful power he had for description would show itself, when he would often stand up to enact the incident of which he spoke, so ardent was he, and so earnest in the recital.