[1] Why will my friend Professor Saintsbury, in range of reading and industry the master of us all, insist on trying to persuade us that in the metre of _Endymion_ Keats owed something to the _Pharonnida_ of William Chamberlayne? There is absolutely no metrical usage in Keats's poem for which his familiar Elizabethan and Jacobean masters do not furnish ample precedent: he differs from them only in taking more special care to avoid any prolonged run of closed couplets. I do not believe he could have brought himself to read two pages of _Pharonnida_. But that is only an opinion, and the matter can be decided by a simple computation on the fingers. The fact is that there are no five pages of _Pharonnida_ which do not contain more of those unfortunate rimings on 'in' and 'by' and 'to' and 'on' and 'of' followed by their nouns in the next line, or worse still, on 'to' followed by its infinitive,--on 'it' and 'than' and 'be' and 'which,' and all the featherweight particles and prepositions and auxiliaries and relatives impossible to stress or pause on for a moment,--than can be found in any whole book of _Endymion_. It is also a fact that the average proportion of lines not ending with a comma or other pause is in _Pharonnida_ about ten to one, and in _Endymion_ not more than two and a half to one. That the sentence-structure of _Pharonnida_ is as detestably disjointed and invertebrate as that of _Endymion_ is graceful and well-articulated I hesitate to insist, because that again is a matter of ear and feeling, and not, like my other points, of sheer arithmetic. [2] The flaw here is of course the use of the forced rime-word 'unseam.' The only authority for the word is Shakespeare, who uses it in _Macbeth_, in a sufficiently different sense and context-- 'Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps.' The vision in Keats's mind was probably of a track dividing, or as it were ripping apart, the two sides of a valley. [3] 'All the strange, mysterious and unaccountable sounds which were heard in solitary places, were attributed to Pan, the God of rural scenery' (Baldwin's _Pantheon_, ed. 1806, p. 104). Keats possessed a copy of this well-felt and well-written little primer of mythology, by William Godwin the philosopher writing under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin; and the above is only one of several suggestions directly due to it which are to be found in his poetry.