Haydon, as we have seen, said that Keats had an exquisite sense of humour. There are few things more difficult to analyse than the sense of humour; few points as to which different people will vary more in opinion than the possession, by any particular man, of a sense of humour, or the account, good or bad, to which he turned this sense. Certainly there is a large amount of jocularity in the familiar writings of Keats--often a quick perception of the ridiculous or the risible, sometimes a telling jest or _jeu d'esprit_. I confess, however, that to myself most of Keats's fun appears forced or inept, wanting in fineness of taste and manner, and tending towards the vulgar; a jangling jingle of word and notion. Punning plays a large part in it, as it did in Leigh Hunt's familiar converse. Some specimens of Keats's funning or punning seem to me a humiliating exhibition, as, for instance, a letter, January 1819, which Armitage Brown addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Dilke, with interpolations by Keats. No doubt both the friends were resolutely bent upon being silly on that occasion; but to be silly is not fully tantamount to being "a fellow of infinite jest," or having an exquisite sense of humour. There is some very exasperating writing also in a letter to Reynolds (May 1818), about "making Wordsworth and Colman play at leap-frog, or keeping one of them down a whole half-holiday at fly-the-garter," &c., &c. A feeling for the inappropriate is perhaps one element of jocoseness; if so, Keats may have been genuinely jocose when (as he wrote in his very last letter to Brown) he "at his worst, even in quarantine [in Naples Harbour], summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of his life." He had a good power of mimicry, as well as of dramatic recital. He did indisputably, towards September 1819, play off one practical joke--Brown was the victim--with eminent success; pretending that a certain Mr. Nathan Benjamin, who was then renting Brown's house at Hampstead, had written a letter complaining of illness--gravel, caused by some lime-tainted water on the premises. But the success depended upon a very singular coincidence, viz., that by mere chance Keats had happened to give the tenant's name correctly. The angry reply of Brown to the angry supposititious letter of Benjamin, and the astonishment of Benjamin upon receiving Brown's retort, are fertile of laughter. Keats does not appear to have ever made any pretence to defined religious belief of any sort, nor seriously to have debated the subject, or troubled his mind about it one way or the other. He was certainly not a Christian. His early friend, Mr. Felton Mathew, speaks of him as "of the sceptical and republican school." On Christmas Eve, 1816, soon after he had come of age, he wrote the following sonnet--