Mr. John Gilmer Speed, in his _Memoirs of Keats_, presents an engraving of “John Keats from the Life-Mask of Haydon in 1818,” and pronounces it the most satisfactory of the likenesses of Keats that he has seen. In no other of the _Lives_ of Keats is any allusion made to this mask; it is not mentioned in any of the published letters to or from Keats, or in _The Correspondence and Table-Talk of Haydon_. Joseph Severn, shortly before he died, told Mr. Richard Watson Gilder that he _believed_ the cast to have been the work of Haydon, and that he prized it as the most interesting, as it is the most real and accurate, portrait of his friend in existence; and through him were procured the few copies of it in this country, one of which is here reproduced. Mr. Gilder considers it much more agreeable than the death-mask must have been, for it not only escapes the haggardness of death, but there is even, so it seems to him, a suggestion of humorous patience in the expression of the mouth. “In this mask,” he adds, “one has the authentic form and shape—the very stamp of the poet’s visage.” And he calls attention to the fact of its remarkable resemblance to more than one of the members of the Keats family whom he has met. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: JOHN KEATS] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Charles Cowden Clarke, who does not seem to have been aware of the existence of the mask, said that the best portrait of Keats is the first done by Severn himself, that which is engraved in Hunt’s _Lord Byron and his Contemporaries_. Lord Houghton, in his _Life of Keats_, quoted the description given him by a lady (probably Mrs. B. W. Procter), who watched Keats in the Surrey Institute in London, listening to Hazlitt’s course of Lectures on the British Poets, in the winter of 1817-18. “His countenance,” she said, “lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had an expression as if it had been looking at some glorious sight. His mouth was full and less intellectual than his other features.” Leigh Hunt drew his portrait more carefully. “Every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately alive. If there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. The face was rather long than otherwise; the upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive; his hair, of a brown color, was fine, and hung in natural ringlets. His head was a puzzle for the phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull, a singularity which he had in common with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get on.”