the other portraits, the impression of a fine and distinguished mould of face. Severn left yet other likenesses of Keats--posthumous, and of inferior interest. There is moreover a chalk drawing by the painter Hilton, who used to meet Keats at the house of the publisher Mr. Taylor. It has an artificial air, and conveys a notion of the general character of the face different from the other records, but may assist us towards estimating what Keats was like about, or very soon before, the commencement of his fatal illness. Lastly, though the list of extant portraits is not even thus exhausted, I mention the medallion by Girometti, which is to all appearance a posthumous performance. Its lines correspond pretty well with the profile sketch by Haydon, while in character it assimilates more to Hilton's drawing. To me it seems of very little importance as a document, but Hamilton Reynolds thought it the best likeness of all. Mrs. Llanos was in favour of the mask; Mr. Cowden Clarke, of the crayon drawing by Severn--which, indeed, conveys a bright impression of eager, youthful impulsiveness. The character of Keats appears to me not a very easy one to expound. To begin with, it stands to reason that a man who died at the age of twenty-five can only have half evolved and evinced himself; there must have been a great deal which time and trial, had these been granted, would have developed, but which untimely fate left to conjecture. We are thus compelled to judge of an apprentice in the severe school of life as if he had gone through its full course; many things about him may, in their real nature, have been fleeting and tentative, which to us pass for final and established. This difficulty has to be allowed for, but cannot be got over; the only Keats with whom we have to deal is the Keats who had not completed his twenty-sixth year. For him, as for other youths, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had budded apace; the fruit remained for ever unmatured. Another gravely deflecting force in our estimation of the character of Keats consists in the fact that what we really care for in him is his poetry. We admire his poetry, and condole his inequitable treatment, and his hard and premature fate, and are disposed to see his life in the light of his verse and his sufferings. Hence arises a facile and perhaps vapid enthusiasm, with an inclination to praise through thick and thin, or to ignore such points as may not be susceptible of praise. The sympathetic biographer is a very pleasant fellow; but the truthful biographer also has something to say for himself in the long run. I aspire to the part of the truthful biographer, duly sympathetic.