In the latter part of the time--perhaps eighteen months--that he remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading. Thus, his _whole_ time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive memory, and the quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those last months have exhausted the school library, which consisted principally of abridgements of all the voyages and travels of any note; Mavor's collection, also his _Universal History_; Robertson's histories of Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss Edgeworth's productions, together with many other books equally well calculated for youth. The books, however, that were his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lempriere's _Classical Dictionary_, which he appeared to _learn_, and Spence's _Polymetis_. This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with the Greek mythology; here was he 'suckled in that creed outworn;' for his amount of classical attainment extended no farther than the _AEneid_, with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated that before leaving school he had _voluntarily_ translated in writing a considerable portion.... He must have gone through all the better publications in the school library, for he asked me to lend him some of my own books; and, in my 'mind's eye,' I now see him at supper (we had our meals in the schoolroom), sitting back on the form, from the table, holding the folio volume of Burnet's _History of his Own Time_ between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This work, and Leigh Hunt's _Examiner_--which my father took in, and I used to lend to Keats--no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty. In the midst of these ardent studies of Keats's latter school days befell the death of his mother, who had been for some time in failing health. First she was disabled by chronic rheumatism, and at last fell into a rapid consumption, which carried her off at the age of thirty-five in February 1810. We are told with what devotion her eldest boy attended her sick-bed,--'he sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine, or even cook her food, but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease,'--and how bitterly he mourned for her when she was gone,--'he gave way to such impassioned and prolonged grief (hiding himself in a nook under the master's desk) as awakened the liveliest pity and sympathy in all who saw him.'