pening a
temporal artery; he was entirely successful in it, but the success
appeared to himself like a miracle, the recurrence of which was not to
be reckoned on.

While surgery was waning with Keats, and finally dying out--an upshot
for which the exact date is not assigned, nor perhaps assignable--he was
making, at first through his intimacy with Cowden Clarke, some good
literary acquaintances. The brothers John and Leigh Hunt were the centre
of the circle to which Keats was thus admitted. John was the publisher,
and Leigh the editor, of _The Examiner_. They had both been lately
fined, and imprisoned for two years, for a libel on the Prince Regent,
George IV.; it was perhaps legally a libel, and was certainly a
castigation laid on with no indulgent hand. Leigh Hunt (born in 1784,
and therefore Keats's senior by some eleven years) is known to us all as
a fresh and airy essayist, a fresh and airy poet, a liberal thinker in
the morals both of society and of politics (hardly a politician in the
stricter sense of the term), a charming companion, a too-constant
cracker of genial jocosities and of puns. He understood good literature
both instinctively and critically; but was too full of tricksy
mannerisms, and of petted byways in thought and style, to be an
altogether safe associate for a youthful literary aspirant, whether as
model or as Mentor. Leigh Hunt first saw Keats in the spring of 1816,
not at his residence in Hampstead as has generally been supposed, but at
No. 8 York Buildings, New Road.[2] The earliest meeting of Keats with
Haydon was in November 1816, at Hunt's house; Haydon born in 1786, the
zealous and impatient champion of high art, wide-minded and combative,
too much absorbed in his love for art to be without a considerable
measure of self-seeking for art's apostle, himself. He painted into his
large picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem the head of Keats, along
with those of Wordsworth and others. Another acquaintance was Mr.
Charles Ollier, the publisher, who wrote verse and prose of his own. The
Ollier firm in the early spring of 1817 became the publishers of Keats's
first volume of poems, of which more anon. Still earlier than the
Hunts, Haydon, and Ollier, Keats had known John Hamilton Reynolds, his
junior by a year, a poetical writer of some mark, now too nearly
forgotten, author of "The Garden of Florence," "The Fancy," and the
prose tale, "Miserrimus"; he was the son of the writing-master at Christ