We have now reached the close of a melancholy history--that of the extinction, in a space of less than twenty-six years, of a bright life foredoomed by inherited disease. We turn to another subject--the intellectual development and the writings of Keats, what they were, and how they were treated. Here again there are some sombre tints. A minute anecdote, apparently quite authentic, shows that a certain propensity to the jingle of rhyme was innate in Keats: Haydon is our informant. "An old lady (Mrs. Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury) told his brother George--when, in reply to her question what John was doing, he told her he had determined to become a poet--that this was very odd; because when he could just speak, instead of answering questions put to him, he would always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then laugh." This, however, is the only rhyming-anecdote that we hear of Keats's childhood or mere boyhood: there is nothing to show that at school he made the faintest attempt at verse-spinning. The earliest known experiment of his is the "Imitation of Spenser"--four Spenserian stanzas, beginning-- "Now Morning from her orient chamber came," and very poor stanzas they are. This Imitation was written while he was living at Edmonton, in his nineteenth year, and thus there was nothing singularly precocious in Keats, either in the age at which he began versifying, or in the skill with which he first addressed himself to the task. I might say more of other verses, juvenile in the amplest sense of the term, but such remarks would belong more properly to a later section of this volume. I will therefore only observe here that the earliest poems of his in which I can discern anything even distantly approaching to poetic merit or to his own characteristic style (and these distantly indeed) are the lines "To ----" "Hadst thou lived in days of old," and "Calidore, a Fragment," "Young Calidore is paddling o'er the lake." The dates of these two compositions are not stated, but they were probably later than the opening of 1815, and if so Keats would have been nearly or quite twenty when he wrote them--and this is far remote from precocity. Let us say then, once for all, that, whatever may be the praise and homage due to Keats for ranking as one of the immortals when he died aged twenty-five, no sort of encomium can be awarded to him on the ground that, when he first began, he began early and well. All his rawest attempts, be it added to his credit, appear to have been kept to himself; for Cowden Clarke, who was certainly his chief literary confidant in those tentative days, says that until Keats produced to him his sonnet "written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison" the youth's attempts at verse-writing were to him unknown. The 3rd of February 1815 was the day of Hunt's liberation, so that the endeavour had by this time been going on in silence for something like a year or more.