How Keats felt on the subject of the class struggle was startlingly indicated in the last days of his life. Dying of consumption, he took a sea voyage to Italy, a journey which was a frightful strain upon him. He landed in Naples; and Naples, as we know, is warm and beautiful, a place for a poet to rest and dream in. But Keats would not dream; he smelt the foul atmosphere of royalist intrigue and tyranny, and would not stay. A friend took him to the theater, and he saw a gendarme standing on either side of the stage, and took that for a symbol of censorship and despotism, and would not sit out the performance! He died in Rome, and after his death Shelley wrote “Adonais,” a eulogy of Keats and an attack on his detractors. Little by little his fame began to spread, and everywhere it was recognized by the Tories as part of the class struggle of the time. Sir Walter Scott had been pained by the personal venom of Lockhart’s attack in “Blackwood’s”; but not enough to cause him to withdraw his subsidy from the magazine, nor to prevent his accepting Lockhart as his son-in-law and future biographer. A young Englishman of radical sympathies defended Keats, and a friend of Lockhart’s intervened in the argument, and forced a duel with Keats’ defender, and killed him. That is the way literary questions were settled in those days! When you fight for the fame of Keats you are asserting the idea that genius is not a privilege of rank and wealth, but that the precious fire smoulders also among the masses of the people, so that a stable-keeper’s son, self-taught, may become one of his country’s greatest poets. Some critics would accept that doctrine now; but not all, it would appear. Here is Henry A. Beers, eminent scholar and professor of English literature in Yale University, writing in the Yale “Review,” and saying: “There _was_ something a little underbred about Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, and even perhaps about Keats.”