I, on the other hand, was languid and melancholy--fond of repose--thoughtful beyond my years--and diffident to the last degree.... He was of the sceptical and republican school--an advocate for the innovations which were making progress in his time--a faultfinder with everything established. I on the other hand hated controversy and dispute--dreaded discord and disorder"[15]--and Keats, our good Mr Timorous farther testifies, was very kind and amiable, always ready to apologize for shocking him. As to his poetical predilections, the impression left on Mr Mathew quite corresponds with that recorded by Mr Stephens:--"he admired more the external decorations than felt the deep emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the pathetic. He used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never observed the tears nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme sensibility." The exact order and chronology of Keats's own first efforts in poetry it is difficult to trace. They were certainly neither precocious nor particularly promising. The circumstantial account of Brown above quoted compels us to regard the lines _In Imitation of Spenser_ as the earliest of all, and as written at Edmonton about the end of 1813 or beginning of 1814. They are correct and melodious, and contain few of those archaic or experimental eccentricities of diction which we shall find abounding a little later in Keats's work. Although, indeed, the poets whom Keats loved the best both first and last were those of the Elizabethan age, it is clear that his own earliest verses were modelled timidly on the work of writers nearer his own time. His professedly Spenserian lines resemble not so much Spenser as later writers who had written in his measure, and of these not the latest, Byron[16], but rather such milder minstrels as Shenstone, Thomson, and Beattie, or most of all perhaps the sentimental Irish poetess Mrs Tighe; whose _Psyche_ had become very popular since her death, and by its richness of imagery, and flowing and musical versification, takes a place, now too little recognised, among the pieces preluding the romantic movement of the time. That Keats was familiar with this lady's work is proved by his allusion to it in the lines, themselves very youthfully turned in the tripping manner of Tom Moore, which he addressed about this time to some ladies who had sent him a present of a shell. His two elegiac stanzas _On Death_, assigned by George Keats to the year 1814, are quite in an eighteenth-century style and vein of moralizing. Equally so is the address _To Hope_ of February 1815, with its 'relentless fair' and its personified abstractions, 'fair Cheerfulness,' 'Disappointment, parent of Despair,' 'that fiend Despondence,' and the rest. And once more, in the ode _To Apollo_ of the same date, the voice with which this young singer celebrates his Elizabethan masters is an