Early in the autumn of 1815, a few weeks before his twentieth birthday, Keats left the service of Mr Hammond, his indentures having apparently been cancelled by consent, and went to live in London as a student at the hospitals, then for teaching purposes united, of Guy's and St Thomas's. What befell him during the eighteen months that followed, and how his career as a student came to an end, will be told in the next two chapters.[8] FOOTNOTES: [1] Between the forms with and without the final 's' there is no hard and fast line to be drawn, one getting changed into the other either regularly, by the normal addition of the possessive or patronymic suffix, or casually, through our mere English habit of phonetic carelessness and slipshod pronunciation. I learn from a correspondent belonging to the very numerous St Teath stock, and signing and known only as Keat, that other members of his family call themselves Keats. And my friend Mr F. B. Keate, working-man poet and politician of Bristol, whose forbears came from Tiverton and earlier probably from St Teath, assures me that he is addressed Keates in speech and writing as often as not. There are several families in Bristol, most of them coming from Wilts or (as the famous flogging headmaster of Eton came) from Somerset, whose names are spelt and spoken Keat or Keats and Keate or Keates indifferently. [2] This document, a memorandum written for the information of Keats's friend and publisher, John Taylor, was sold in London in 1907. I saw and took rough note of it before the sale, meaning to follow it up afterwards: but circumstances kept me otherwise fully occupied, and later I found that the buyer, a well known and friendly bookseller, had unfortunately mislaid it: neither has he since been able to recover it from among the chronic congestion of his shelves. [3] Houghton MSS. [4] Charles Cowden Clarke,_ Recollection of Writers_, 1878. [5] _Rawlings v. Jennings._ [6] She was buried at St Stephen's, Colman Street, Decr. 19, 1814, aged 78.