Meantime Keats had been apprenticed to a surgeon, and became a dresser in a hospital. He was called an apothecary’s apprentice; and so when he published “Endymion,” the ruling-class critics of the day fell upon him. The insolence of a low-bred fellow, imagining that he could write a poem dealing with Greek mythology, the field above all others reserved to university culture! “Back to your shop, John,” cried the “Quarterly Review,” “back to plasters, pills and ointment boxes!” You see, it was not a literary issue at all; it was a political and social issue. In “Blackwood’s” appeared a ferocious article, denouncing not merely Keats, but the whole “cockney school,” as it was called; this including Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley and Keats. “Cockney” is the word by which the cultured gentry of England describe the vulgar populace of London, who drop their h’s and talk about their “dyly pyper.” The Tory reviewers were only incidentally men of letters; they were young country squires amusing themselves with radical-baiting, they were “athletes, outdoor men, sportsmen, salmon-fishers, deer-stalkers.” They gathered at Ambrose’s and drank strong Scotch whiskey, and sang a rollicking song of which the chorus ran: “Curse the people, blast the people, damn the lower orders.” And when they attacked the “Cockney” poets, it was not merely because of their verses, but because of their clothing and their faces and even their complexions. “Pimply Hazlitt” was their phrase for the greatest essayist of their time; they alleged that both Hazlitt and Lamb drank gin--and gin was the drink for washerwomen. Keats wrote “Endymion” at the age of twenty-one, and two years later he suffered a hemorrhage, which meant the permanent breaking of his health. He wrote his last lines at the age of twenty-four, and died early in his twenty-fifth year. So you see he had not long to win his way against these aristocratic rowdies. He was poor, and exquisitely sensitive; he suffered under such brutal attacks, but he went on, and did the best work he could, and said, very quietly: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.” He realized the dignity of his calling, and in his letters made clear that he did not take the ivory tower attitude toward his art. “I am ambitious of doing the world some good,” he wrote; “if I should be spared, that may be the work of future years.” And in the course of his constant self-criticism and groping after new methods and new powers, he traveled far from the naive sensuousness of his early poems. His last work was a kind of prologue to “Hyperion,” in which he discussed the poet and his function, and laid down the law that only those can climb to the higher altar of art to whom the miseries of the world Are misery and will not let them rest.