John Keats was born in October 1795. At the age of nine he lost his father. His mother sent him to a good school; but she, too, to his inexpressible grief, died while he was still a boy. His appearance corresponded to the impression which his poetry makes on us. Whilst the feminine and ethereal Shelley had a slender, slightly-built, narrow-chested figure and a shrill voice, the heavier footed, more earth-bound Keats was deep-chested and broad-shouldered; his lower limbs were small in comparison with the upper; and he had a deep, grave voice. His small head was covered with thick brown curls; the eyes were large and of a dark, on occasion glowing, blue; the handsome mouth had a projecting lower lip, which gave the face a defiant and pugnacious expression. And as a matter of fact he was, as a boy, a perfect little terrier for resoluteness and pugnacity, and seemed much more likely to distinguish himself in war than in literature. He early displayed great personal courage, and was an adept in all athletic exercises; just before he was attacked by consumption he thrashed an insolent butcher in a regular stand-up fight. At the age of fifteen he left school, and was apprenticed by his relations to a clever surgeon-apothecary at Edmonton, with whom he remained till he was twenty, when he began, as a medical student, to walk the London hospitals. He soon, however, gave up medicine for literature, and lived for several years in close companionship with some of the rising young literary men and artists of the day. Then he was attacked by the disease which had carried off his mother and his younger brother. The absence of any prospect of earning a living, and the ever-increasing pressure of poverty, favoured its development, which was farther hastened by a violent and hopeless passion for a young Anglo-Indian lady--a passion only rendered hopeless by Keats's poverty and ill-health--his love being returned. His health obliged him to quit the neighbourhood of his beloved and take a journey to Italy, where he died. Glancing over the non-literary part of Keats's life, we distinguish three facts of leading importance--his want of any real prospect of gaining a livelihood (he had thoughts of emigrating to South America, or applying for a post as surgeon on an Indiaman); the ardent and hopeless passion for the woman without whom life was worthless to him; and the wasting disease.