“And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor”—­

Leigh Hunt called attention to the fact that rushes and not carpets covered the floors in the Middle Ages.  In the same poem, Porphyro sings to his lute an ancient ditty,

  “In Provence called ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’”

The ditty was by Alain Chartier, who was not a troubadour, but a Norman by birth and a French court poet of the fifteenth century.  The title, which Keats found in a note in an edition of Chaucer, pleased his fancy and suggested his ballad,[28] of the same name, which has nothing in common with Chartier’s poem.  The latter is a conventional love estrif in the artificial taste of the time.  But errors of this sort, which any encyclopaedia can correct, are perfectly unimportant.

Byron’s sneer at Keats, as “a tadpole of the Lakes,” was ridiculously wide of the mark.  He was nearly of the second generation of romantics; he was only three years old when “The Ancient Mariner” was published; “Christabel” and Scott’s metrical romances had all been issued before he put forth his first volume.  But though he owes much to Coleridge[29] and more perhaps to Chatterton, he took no imprint from Wordsworth, and cared nothing for Scott.  Keats, like his friend Hunt, turned instinctively away from northern to southern Gothic; from rough border minstrelsy to the mythology and romance of the races that dwelt about the midland sea.  Keats’ sensuous nature longed for “a beaker full of the warm South.”  “I have tropical blood in my veins,” wrote Hunt, deprecating “the criticism of a Northern climate” as applied to his “Story of Rimini.”  Keats’ death may be said to have come to him from Scotland, not only by reason of the brutal attacks in Blackwood’s—­to which there is some reason for believing that Scott was privy—­but because the hardships and exposure of his Scotch tour laid the foundation of his fatal malady.  He brought back no literary spoils of consequence from the North, and the description of the journey in his letters makes it evident that his genius could not find itself there.  This uncomfortable feeling of alienation is expressed in his “Sonnet on Visiting the Tomb of Burns.”  The Scotch landscape seems “cold—­strange.”

  “The short-lived paly Summer is but won
      From Winter’s ague.”

And in the letter from Dumfries, enclosing the sonnet he writes:  “I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish.” Charlemagnish is Keats’ word for the true mediaeval-romantic.  It is noteworthy that Keats avoided Scott’s favourite verse forms.  “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is not in the minstrel ballad measure; and when Keats uses the eight-syllabled couplet, he uses it very differently from Scott, without the alternate riming which prevails in “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” and all the rest of the series.