[7] Mistakes have crept into the received statements (my own included) as to the dates when Keats's apprenticeship began and ended. The witnesses on whom we have chiefly to depend wrote from thirty to fifty years after the events they were trying to recall, and some of them, Cowden Clarke especially, had avowedly no memory for dates. The accepted date of Keats's leaving school and going as apprentice to Mr Hammond at Edmonton has hitherto been the autumn of 1810, the end of his fifteenth year. It should have been the late summer of 1811, well on in his sixteenth, as is proved by the discovery of a copy of Bonnycastle's _Astronomy_ given him as a prize at the end of the midsummer term that year (see _Bulletin of the Keats-Shelley Memorial_, Rome, 1913, p. 23). On the other hand we have material evidence of his having left by the following year, in the shape of an Ovid presented to him from the school and inscribed with a fine writing-master's flourish, 'JOHN KEATS, emer: 1812;' _emer_, added in a fainter ink, is of course for _emeritus_, a boy who has left school. This book is in the Dilke collection of Keats relics at Hampstead, and the inscription has been supposed to be Keats's own, which it manifestly is not. Another school-book of Keats's, of five years' earlier date, has lately been presented to the same collection: this is the French-English grammar of Duverger,--inscribed in much the same calligraphy with his name and the date 1807. He must have studied it to some purpose, if we may judge by the good reading knowledge of French which he clearly possessed when he was grown up.