About the period of this portion of the correspondence (1880) I was engaged reading up old periodicals dating from 1816 to 1822. My purpose was to get at first-hand all available data relative to the life of Keats. I thought I met with a good deal of fresh material, and as the result of my reading I believed myself able to correct a few errors as to facts into which previous writers on the subject had fallen. Two things at least I realised--first, that Keats’s poetic gift developed very rapidly, more rapidly perhaps than that of Shelley; and, next, that Keats received vastly more attention and appreciation in his day than is commonly supposed. I found it was quite a blunder to say that the first volume of miscellaneous poems fell flat. Lord Houghton says in error that the book did not so much as seem to signal the advent of a new Cockney poet! It is a fact, however, that this very book, in conjunction with one of Shelley’s and one of Hunt’s, all published 1816-17, gave rise to the name “The Cockney School of Poets,” which was invented by the writer signing “Z.” in _Blackwood_ in the early part of 1818. Nor had Keats to wait for the publication of the volume before attaining to some poetic distinction. At the close of 1816, an article, under the head of “Young Poets,” appeared in _The Examiner_, and in this both Shelley and Keats were dealt with. Then _The Quarterly_ contained allusions to him, though not by name, in reviews of Leigh Hunt’s work, and _Blackwood_ mentioned him very frequently in all sorts of places as “Johnny Keats”--all this (or much of it) before he published anything except occasional sonnets and other fugitive poems in _The Examiner_ and elsewhere. And then when _Endymion_ appeared it was abundantly reviewed. _The Edinburgh_ reviewers had nothing on it (the book cannot have been sent to them, for in 1820 they say they have only just met with it), and I could not find anything in the way of _original_ criticism in _The Examiner_; but many provincial papers (in Manchester, Exeter, and elsewhere) and some metropolitan papers retorted on _The Quarterly_. All this, however, does not disturb the impression which (Lord Houghton and Mr. W. M. Rossetti notwithstanding) I have been from the first compelled to entertain, namely, that “labour spurned” did more than all else to kill Keats _in 1821_.