Most men who write in praise of Shakespeare write in praise of themselves. Shakespeare is their mirror. Respectable middle-aged professors generally think of him as the respectable middle-aged man of the Stratford bust. Mr. Frank Harris sees him as Mr. Frank Harris with a difference. Mr. Charles Whibley imagines him as a Whibleyesque Tory with a knotted whip ever ready for the back of democracy. After reading _The John Keats Memorial Volume_, consisting of appreciations in prose and verse from all manner of contributors, great and little, one comes to the conclusion that most men interpret Keats in the same easy-going way. Thus, Mr. Bernard Shaw notes that the poet of the _Ode to a Nightingale_ and the _Ode on Melancholy_ was “a merry soul, a jolly fellow, who could not only carry his splendid burthen of genius, but swing it round, toss it up and catch it again, and whistle a tune as he strode along,” and he discovers in three verses of _The Pot of Basil_ “the immense indictment of the profiteers and exploiters with which Marx has shaken capitalistic civilisation to its foundations, even to its overthrow in Russia.” To Dr. Arthur Lynch, on the other hand, Keats is primarily a philosopher, whose philosophic principles “account for his Republicanism as well as for his criticisms of poetry.” Mr. Arthur Symons takes an opposite view. “John Keats,” he tells us, “at a time when the phrase had not yet been invented, practised the theory of art for art’s sake.... Keats had something feminine and twisted in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves ... which it is now the fashion to call decadent.” To Sir Ian Hamilton (who contributes a beautiful comment, saved by its passion from the perils of high-flownness) Keats was the prototype of the heroic youth that sacrificed itself in the war. Did he not once declare his willingness to “jump down Etna for any great public good”; and did he not write: The Patriot shall feel My stern alarum and unsheath his steel? And, if we dip into the thousands of other things that have been written about Keats, including the centenary appreciations, we shall find this personal emphasis on the part of the critic again and again.