I do not pretend to have
succeeded." Keats's experiment reads agreeably. It comprises five rhymes
altogether; the first rhyme being repeated thrice at arbitrary
intervals; and the last rhyme twice in lines twelve and fourteen.

The tragedy of "Otho the Great" was written by Keats (as already
referred to) in July and August 1819, in co-operation with Armitage
Brown. The diction of the play is, it would appear, Keats's entirely;
whereas the invention and development of plot in the first four acts is
wholly due to Brown. The two friends sat together; Brown described each
successive scene, and Keats turned it into verse, without troubling his
head as to the subject-matter for the scene next ensuing. When it came
to the fifth act, however, Keats inquired what would be the conclusion
of the play; and, not being satisfied with Brown's project which he
deemed too humorous and too melodramatic, he both invented and wrote a
fifth act for himself. He felt sure that "Otho the Great" was "a
tolerable tragedy," and set his heart upon getting it acted--Kean was
well inclined to take the principal character, Prince Ludolph; and it
became his greatest ambition to write fine plays. "Otho" was in fact
accepted for Drury Lane Theatre, on the offer of Brown, who left Keats's
authorship in the background; but, as both the writers were impatient of
delay, Brown, in February 1820, took away the MS., and Covent Garden
Theatre was thought of instead--without any practical result. As soon as
"Otho" was finished, Brown suggested King Stephen as the subject of
another drama; and Keats, without any further collaboration from his
friend, composed the few scenes of it which remain. "One of my
ambitions" (writes Keats to Bailey in August 1819), "is to make as great
a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting."

The ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci," than which Keats did nothing more
thrilling or more perfect, may perhaps have been written in the earlier
half of 1819; it was published in 1820, in Hunt's _Indicator_ for May
10th, under the signature "Caviare"; the same signature which was
adopted for the sonnet, "A dream, after reading Dante's episode of Paolo
and Francesca." Keats may probably have meant to imply, in some
bitterness of spirit, that his poems were "caviare to the general." The
title of this ballad was suggested to Keats by seeing it at the head of
a translation from Alain Chartier in a copy of Chaucer. As to the
"