Unhappy, the connexion doubtless was, as the connexion of a doomed man with the whole world is likely to be; but it would be unfair to assume that the engagement to Miss Brawne took a more unfortunate turn than any engagement would probably take for a man circumstanced as Keats was,—a man without independent means, and debarred by ill-health from earning an independence. Above all, it would be both unsafe and extremely unfair to conclude that either Miss Brawne or Keats’s amiable and admirable true friend Charles Brown was guilty of any real levity. That Keats’s passion was the cause of his death is an assumption which also should be looked at with reserve. Shelley’s immortal Elegy and Byron’s ribald stanzas have been yoked together to draw down the track of years the false notion that adverse criticism killed him; and now that that form of murder has been shewn not to have been committed, there seems to be a reluctance to admit that there was no killing in the matter. Sir Charles Dilke says, at page 7 of the Memoir already cited, that Keats “‘gave in’ to a passion which killed him as surely as ever any man was killed by love.” This may be perfectly true; for perhaps love never did kill any man; but surely it must be superfluous to assume any such dire agency in the decease of a man who had hereditary consumption. Coleridge’s often-quoted verdict, “There is death in that hand,” does not stand alone; and the careful reader of Keats’s Life and Letters will find ample evidence of a state of health likely to lead but to one result,—such as the passage already cited in regard to his staying at home determined to rid himself of sore throat, the account of his return, invalided, from the tour in Scotland, which his friends agreed he ought never to have undertaken, and his own statement to Mr. Dilke, printed in the _Life, Letters, &c._ (Vol. II, p. 7), that he “was not in very good health” when at Shanklin. Lord Houghton’s fine perception of character and implied fact sufficed to prevent his giving any colour to the supposition that Keats was not sufficiently cherished and considered in his latter days: the reproaches that occur in some of the present letters do not lead me to alter the impression conveyed to me on this subject by his Lordship’s memoirs; nor do I doubt that others will make the necessary allowance for the fevered condition of the poet’s mind and the harassed state of body and spirit. Mr. Severn tells me that Mrs. and Miss Brawne felt the keenest regret that they had not followed him and Keats to Rome; and, indeed, I understand that there was some talk of a marriage taking place before the departure. Even twenty years after Keats’s death, when Mr. Severn returned to England, the bereaved lady was unable to receive him on account of the extreme painfulness of the associations connected with him.