Lord Houghton even did his best to raise Keats a step nearer in the social scale by associating him with “the upper rank of the middle class”--an exaggeration, however, which is no more inaccurate than the common view that Keats was brought up on the verge of pauperdom. As a matter of fact, Keats’s father was an ostler who married his employer’s daughter, and his grandfather, the livery stable keeper of Finsbury Pavement, left a fortune of £13,000. But it is not only with regard to his birth that attempts to bring Keats into the fold of respectability are common. His character, and the character of his genius, are unconsciously doctored to suit the tastes of those who do not apparently care for Keats as he actually was. The Keats who thrashed the butcher is more important for them than the Keats who fell in love with Fanny Brawne. They prefer canonising Keats to knowing him, and the logical consequence of their attitude is that the Keats who might have been means more to them than the Keats who was. I do not deny that a great deal that is said about Keats on all sides is true: possibly most of it is true. But much of it is true only as an argument. The manly Keats is the true answer to the effeminate Keats, as the effeminate Keats is the true answer to the manly Keats. The Keats who said: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death,” and the Keats who was “snuffed out by an article” similarly answer one another; and the Keats of _The Fall of Hyperion_ is the perfect critic of the Keats of the _Ode on Indolence_, and _vice versa_. Keats was a score of Keatses. He was luxurious and ascetic, heroic and self-indulgent, ambitious and diffident, an artist and a thinker, vulgar and an æsthete, perfect in phrase and gauche in phrase, melancholy and merry, sensual and spiritual, a cynic about women and one of the great lovers, a teller of heart-easing tales and a would-be redeemer. The perfect portrait of Keats will reveal him in all these contradictory lights, and we shall never understand Keats if we merely isolate one group of facts, such as the thrashing of the butcher, or another group, such as that he thought for a moment of abandoning _Hyperion_ as a result of the hostile reviews of _Endymion_. Keats’s life was not that of a planet beautifully poised as it wheels on its lonely errand. He was a man torn by conflicting demons--a martyr to poetry and love and, ultimately, to ideals of truth and goodness. He bowed before altars that, even when he bowed, he seems to have known were altars of the lesser gods. Not that he blasphemed the greater gods in doing so. He believed that the altar at the foot of the hill was a stage in the poet’s progress to the altar at the summit. As he grew older, however, his vision of the summit became more intense, and a greater Muse announced to him: None can usurp this height But those to whom the miseries of the world Are miseries and will not let them rest.