that the poetry of the classical school was so unsatisfying.  This is one of the very few passages of Keats that are at all doctrinal[24] or polemic; and as such it has been repeatedly cited by biographers and essayists and literary historians.  Lowell quotes it, in his essay on Dryden, and adds; “Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true founder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan authority save Milton.”  Mr. Gosse quotes it and says, “in these lines he has admirably summed up the conceptions of the first half of the present century with regard to classical poetry.” [25] The passage was still fresh when Byron, in the letter to Disraeli already quoted[26] (March 15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as the opinion of “a young person learning to write poetry and beginning by teaching the art. . . .  The writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or seven new schools, in which he has learned to write such lines and such sentiments as the above.  He says ‘easy were the task’ of imitating Pope, or it may be of equalling him, I presume.  I recommend him to try before he is so positive on the subject, and then compare what he will have then written, and what he has now written, with the humblest and earliest compositions of Pope, produced in years still more youthful than those of Mr. Keats when he invented his new ‘Essay on Criticism,’ entitled ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (an ominous title) from whence the above canons are taken.”

In a manuscript note on this passage made after Keats’ death, Byron wrote:  “My indignation at Mr. Keats’ depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius. . . .  He is a loss to our literature, and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was reforming his style upon the more classical models of the language,” Keats made a study of Dryden’s versification before writing “Lamia”; but had he lived to the age of Methusaleh, he would not have “reformed his style” upon any such classical models as Lord Byron had in mind.  Classical he might have become, in the sense in which “Hyperion” is classical; but in the sense in which Pope was classical—­never.  Pope’s Homer he deliberately set aside for Chapman’s—­

  “Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
  Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.” [27]

Keats had read Virgil, but seemingly not much Latin poetry besides, and he had no knowledge of Greek.  He made acquaintance with the Hellenic world through classical dictionaries and a study of the casts in the British Museum.  But his intuitive grasp of the antique ideal of beauty stood him in as good stead as Landor’s scholarship.  In such work as “Hyperion” and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” he mediates between the ancient and the modern spirit, from which Landor’s clear-cut marbles stand aloof in chill remoteness.  As concerns his equipment, Keats stands related to Scott in romance learning much as he does to Landor in classical scholarship.  He was no antiquary, and naturally made mistakes of detail.  In his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” he makes Cortez, and not Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific. A propos of a line in “The Eve of St. Agnes”—­