An elder member of the Rossetti circle, that shrewd and caustic, very originally minded if only half accomplished Scottish poet and painter, William Bell Scott, was much exercised over his friend's misconception in this matter. I will give his comment, certainly in some points just, as written to me in 1885. 'On reading the fragment it seems to me impossible to resist the conclusion that the scene represented is of the present day. The dull and quiet Sunday evening represented is of our time in any cathedral town in England, not the Sunday evening of old when morning Mass was the religious observance, and the evening was spent in long-bow and popinjay games and practice. The weary girl sits at a coal fire with a screen behind her, a Japanese screen apparently,' [Japanese or old English lacquer imitating Oriental the screen certainly is]. 'Every item of the description is modern. But alas! what shall we say to the ancient illuminated MS. she has in hand, with the pictures of early martyrs dying by fire, the Inquisition punishment of heretics, and the writing annotated, the notes referred to modern printers' signs? As he describes a mediaeval MS. book so badly, it may be said he intended the scene of the poem to be mediaeval, but did the description also so badly. But no, the description of the dreariness of Sunday evening, utterly silent but for the passing of the people going to evening sermon, is admirable.' By 'badly' my old friend meant inexactly. But Keats never was nor tried to be exact in his antiquarianism. If we take _The Eve of St Agnes_ as intended to be a faithful picture from the Middle Ages, it simply goes to pieces in the line-- And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor. Probably neither _The Eve of St Agnes_ nor _St Mark's Eve_ were dated with any definiteness in the poet's mind at all. A reference he makes to the last-named piece in a letter from Winchester the following autumn lends no definite support either to the modern or the mediaeval interpretation:--'Some time since I began a poem called _The Eve of St Mark_, quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town on a coolish evening.' The impression of mediaevalism which the two poems convey is not by any evidence of antiquarian knowledge or accuracy but by the intense spirit of romance that is in them,--by that impassioned delight in vivid colour and beautiful, imaginative detail which we have noted.