The talk turning to the _Eve of St Agnes_, Keats showed Woodhouse some changes he had just made in recopying it. One of these introduced a slight but disfiguring note of cynical realism or 'pettish disgust' into the concluding lines telling of the deaths of old Angela and the beadsman, and is the first sign we find of that inclination to mix a worldly would-be Don Juanish vein with romance which was soon to appear so disastrously in the _Cap and Bells_. The other change was to make it clear that the melting of Porphyro into Madeline's dream, at the enchanted climax of the poem, implied love's full fruition between them then and there. At this point Woodhouse's prudery took alarm. He pleaded against the change vehemently, and Keats to tease him still more vehemently defended it, vowing that his own and his hero's character for virility required the new reading, and that he did not write for misses. The correct and excellent Woodhouse, scandalized though he somewhat was by what he calls his friend's 'rhodomontade,' declares that they had a delightful time together. He was leaving London the same afternoon for Weymouth, and Keats came to the coach-office to see him off. At parting they each promised to mend their ways in the matter of letter-writing, Keats holding out the hope, which was not fulfilled, of a rimed epistle to follow. Woodhouse tells how, being the only inside passenger in the coach, he 'amused himself by diving into a deep reverie, and recalling all that had passed during the six hours we were _tete a tete_.' Such touches of over-sensitive prudery set aside, the more light we get on this friend of Keats, Richard Woodhouse, the higher grows our esteem both for his character and judgment. In other extant letters to Taylor of this date, he comments with fine insight on Keats's own confessions of secret pride and obstinacy, and on his vice ('for a vice in a poor man it is') of lending more than he could afford to friends in need. And what can be more sagacious than the following, from a letter of Woodhouse to a lady cousin of his own?--