This was the Elizabethan type of heroic couplet, and its extreme instance is seen in William Chamberlayne’s “Pharonnida” (1659).  There is no proof of Keats’ alleged indebtedness to Chamberlayne, though he is known to have been familiar with another specimen of the type, William Browne’s “Britannia’s Pastorals.”  Hunt also confirmed Keats in the love of Spenser, and introduced him to Ariosto whom he learned to read in the Italian, five or six stanzas at a time.  Dante he read in Cary’s translation, a copy of which was the only book that he took with him on his Scotch trip.  “The fifth canto of Dante,” he wrote (March, 1819), “pleases me more and more; it is that one in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca.”  He afterwards dreamed of the story and wrote a sonnet upon his dream, which Rossetti thought “by far the finest of Keats’ sonnets” next to that on Chapman’s “Homer.” [32] Mr. J. M. Robertson thinks that the influence of Gary’s “Dante” is visible in “Hyperion,” especially in the recast version “Hyperion:  A Vision.” [33] And Leigh Hunt suggests that in the lines in “The Eve of St. Agnes”—­

  “The sculptured dead on each side seem to freeze,
  Emprisoned in black, purgatorial rails: 
  Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries,
  He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails
  To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails”—­

the germ of the thought is in Dante.[34] Keats wished that Italian might take the place of French in English schools.  To Hunt’s example was also due, in part, that fondness for neologisms for which the latter apologises in the preface to “Rimini,” and with which Keats was wont to enrich his diction, as well as with Chattertonian archaisms, Chapmanese compounds, “taffeta phrases, silken terms precise” from Elizabethan English, and coinages like poesied, jollying, eye-earnestly—­licenses and affectations which gave dire offence to Gifford and the classicals generally.

In the 1820 volume, which includes Keats’ maturest work, there was a story from the “Decameron,” “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil,” which tells how a lady exhumes the body of her murdered lover, cuts off the head and buries it in a pot of sweet basil, which she keeps in her chamber and waters with her tears.  It was perhaps symptomatic of a certain morbid sensibility in Keats to select this subject from so cheerful a writer as Boccaccio.  This intensity of love surviving in face of leprosy, torment, decay, and material horrors of all kinds; this passionate clinging of spirit to body, is a mediaeval note, and is repeated in the neo-romantic school which derives from Keats; in Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, O’Shaughnessy, Marzials, and Paine.  Think of the unshrinking gaze which Dante fixes upon the tortures of the souls in pain; of the wasted body of Christ upon the cross; of the fasts, flagellations, mortifications of penitents; the unwashed friars, the sufferings of martyrs.  Keats apologises for his endeavour “to make old prose in modern rime more sweet,” and for his departure from the even, unexcited narrative of his original: