This passage Mr. Dilke considered "an exact picture of the man's mind and character," adding: "He could at any time have 'thought himself out,' mind and body. Thought was intense with him, and seemed at times to assume a reality that influenced his conduct, and, I have no doubt, helped to wear him out." Whether Keats should be regarded as a young man tolerably regular in his mode of life, or manifestly tending to the irregular, is a question not entirely clear. We have seen something of a sexual misadventure in Oxford, and of six weeks of hard drinking, attested by Haydon; and it should be added that two or three of Keats's minor poems have a certain unmistakable twang of erotic laxity. Lord Houghton thought that in the winter of 1817-18 the poet had indulged somewhat "in that dissipation which is the natural outlet for the young energies of ardent temperaments;" but he held that it all amounted to no more than "a little too much rollicking" (Keats's own phrase), and he would not allow that either drinking or gaming had proceeded to any serious extent, "for, in his letters to his brothers, he speaks of having drunk too much as a rare piece of joviality, and of having won L10 at cards as a great hit." Medical students, it may be added, are not, as a rule, conspicuous for mortifying the flesh; Keats, however, according to Mr. Stephens, did not indulge in any vice during his term of studentship. He was eminently open, as his writings evidence, to impressions of enjoyment; and one may not unnaturally suppose that the joys of sense numbered him, no less than the average of young men, among their votaries--not indeed among their slaves. He had not, I think, any taste for those "manly recreations" which consist chiefly in making the lower animals uncomfortable, or in putting a quietus to their comforts and discomforts along with their lives. I only observe one occasion on which he went out with a gun. He then (towards the close of 1818) accompanied Mr. Dilke in shooting on Hampstead Heath, and his trophy was a solitary tomtit. As to strength or stability of character, it is rather amusing to find Keats picking a hole in Haydon, while Haydon could probe a joint in the armour of Keats. In November 1817 Haydon had been playing rather fast and loose (so at least it seemed to Keats and to his friend Bailey) with a pictorial aspirant named Cripps, and Keats wrote to Bailey in the following terms: