[8] Surmise, partly founded on the vague recollections of former fellow-students, has hitherto dated this step a year earlier, in the autumn of 1814. But the publication of the documents relating to Keats from the books of the hospital show that this is an error. He was not entered as a student at Guy's till October 1, 1815. If he had moved to London, as has been supposed, a year earlier, he would have had nothing to do there, nor is it the least likely that his guardian would have permitted such removal. That he came straight from Mr Hammond's to Guy's, without any intermediate period of study elsewhere, is certain both from a note to that effect against the entry of his name in the hospital books, and from the explicit statement of his fellow-student and sometime housemate, Mr Henry Stephens. It results that the period of his life as hospital student in a succession of London lodgings must be cut down from the supposed two years and a half, October 1814-April 1817, to one year and a half, Oct. 1815-April 1817. There is no difficulty about this, and I think that both as to his leaving school and his going to London the facts and dates set forth in the present chapter may be taken as well established. CHAPTER II OCTOBER 1815-MARCH 1817: HOSPITAL STUDIES: POETICAL AMBITIONS: LEIGH HUNT Hospital days: summary--Aptitudes and ambitions--Teachers--Testimony of Henry Stephens--Pride and other characteristics--Evidences of a wandering mind--Services of Cowden Clarke--Introduction to Leigh Hunt--Summer walks at Hampstead--Holiday epistles from Margate--Return to London--First reading of Chapman's Homer--Date of the Chapman sonnet--Intimacy with Leigh Hunt--The _Examiner_: Hunt's imprisonment--His visitors in captivity--His occupations--_The Feast of the poets_--Hunt's personality and charm--His ideas of poetical reform--_The story of Rimini_--Its popularity--Dante and namby-pamby--Hunt's life at Hampstead--Hunt and Keats compared--Keats at Hunt's cottage--Prints in the library--The intercoronation scene--Sonnets of Hunt to Keats--Sonnets of Keats to Hunt--Keats's penitence.