been without the foundation and trammels of Puritanism, that Shelley was, though his wild and tender lyric note was even more exquisite than Milton’s. Neither was, in the full sense, human, for both were without humor, as may be seen in their humorous pieces. Keats, but three years younger than Shelley (1795), was more a true child of the nineteenth century. His social ideas, though of course liberal, were more in abeyance; he was more exclusively an artist; and his art was more controlled by the revived Elizabethanism of Leigh Hunt (1784). That singular man, who had so much taste, and so much of it bad; so intense a theory of social benevolence, and so keen a belief that it was more blessed to receive than to give, “owed little” (in the way of literature) “to any but the old masters, and many contemporaries owed not a little to him.” Few owed more, for good and bad, than Keats. Virgil he had found out for himself, and had translated when a schoolboy. Spenser, too, he found for himself, and Greece he discovered afresh in Lemprière’s _Dictionary_ and in Chapman’s _Homer_. But this superficial euphuism and elaborate verbal quaintness he partly derived at second hand from Leigh Hunt. That something in Leigh Hunt which suggested Harold Skimpole to Dickens, and his violent conception of _The Cockney School_ to Lockhart, was not hidden from Keats, and inspired him with some bitter words. It was what he derived from Hunt that gave occasion to Keats’s assailants, who were more of political than of literary partisans. Lockhart, or Wilson, or both, with the _Quarterly_ reviewer, in attacking _Endymion_ were attacking, they thought, a member of an affected, effeminate, and radical coterie. Keats himself, maturing with the suddenness of genius, looked on _Endymion_ as thoroughly immature. But killed, or even discouraged, by his critics he was not, and on a page of a copy of _Lamia_ where his publishers spoke of his discouragment he wrote “This is a lie.” (The copy is in the possession of Canon Ainger.) Keats, like Burns, whom he so intensely admired and so unerringly judged as a man and a poet, was his own best critic. Despite his boyish lusciousness of taste, and the fever of letters written when dying, there was no manlier or more chivalrous soul in England than that of the poet of the odes to the nightingale and to autumn. Keats at his best attained sheer perfection of language, of emotion, and of thought. As he advised Shelley to be, he was not content with less than filling all the rifts with pure gold. “Untaught,” like the minstrel of Odysseus, he combined a Greek clarity and largeness of manner with that romance which Greece does not lack, but which he possessed in a degree more conspicuous, at least to readers who are not Greeks. Though he has not been and cannot be imitated, he has supplied to Tennyson and the best moderns a standard and an ideal. That the Shakespearian copiousness of humanity and humor