Here is a small trait of character, recorded by Keats in a letter to
George, from Winchester, September 1819. "I feel I can bear real ills
better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I
rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes,
tie my shoe-strings neatly, and in fact adonize as if I were going out;
then, all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the
greatest relief."

Haydon, as we have seen, said that Keats had an exquisite sense of
humour. There are few things more difficult to analyse than the sense
of humour; few points as to which different people will vary more in
opinion than the possession, by any particular man, of a sense of
humour, or the account, good or bad, to which he turned this sense.
Certainly there is a large amount of jocularity in the familiar writings
of Keats--often a quick perception of the ridiculous or the risible,
sometimes a telling jest or _jeu d'esprit_. I confess, however, that to
myself most of Keats's fun appears forced or inept, wanting in fineness
of taste and manner, and tending towards the vulgar; a jangling jingle
of word and notion. Punning plays a large part in it, as it did in Leigh
Hunt's familiar converse. Some specimens of Keats's funning or punning
seem to me a humiliating exhibition, as, for instance, a letter, January
1819, which Armitage Brown addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Dilke, with
interpolations by Keats. No doubt both the friends were resolutely bent
upon being silly on that occasion; but to be silly is not fully
tantamount to being "a fellow of infinite jest," or having an exquisite
sense of humour. There is some very exasperating writing also in a
letter to Reynolds (May 1818), about "making Wordsworth and Colman play
at leap-frog, or keeping one of them down a whole half-holiday at
fly-the-garter," &c., &c. A feeling for the inappropriate is perhaps one
element of jocoseness; if so, Keats may have been genuinely jocose when
(as he wrote in his very last letter to Brown) he "at his worst, even in
quarantine [in Naples Harbour], summoned up more puns, in a sort of
desperation, in one week than in any year of his life." He had a good
power of mimicry, as well as of dramatic recital. He did indisputably,
towards September 1819, play off one practical joke--Brown was the
victim--with eminent success; pretending that a certain Mr. Nathan
Benjamin, who was then renting Brown's house at Hampstead, had