bear this point well in
mind, should carefully discriminate the house in Well Walk from another
house, Wentworth Place, afterwards tenanted by Keats and others at
Hampstead, and, every time that the question occurs to his thought,
should pass a mental vote of thanks to Mr. Buxton Forman for the great
pains which he took to settle the point, and the lucid and pleasant
account which he has given of it. Keats was at Leatherhead in November;
finished the first draft of "Endymion" at Burford Bridge, near Dorking,
on the 28th of that month, and returned to Hampstead for the winter.
Two anecdotes which have often been repeated belong apparently to about
this date. One of them purports that Keats gave a sound drubbing in
Hampstead to a butcher, or a butcher's boy, who was ill-treating a small
boy, or else a cat. Hunt simply says that the butcher "had been
insolent,"--by implication, to Keats himself. The "butcher's boy" has
obtained traditional currency; but, according to George Keats, the
offender was "a scoundrel in livery," the locality "a blind alley at
Hampstead." Clarke says that the stand-up fight lasted nearly an hour.
Keats was an undersized man, in fact he was not far removed from the
dwarfish, being barely more than five feet high, and this small feat of
stubborn gallantry deserves to be appraised and praised accordingly. The
other anecdote is that Coleridge met Keats along with Leigh Hunt in a
lane near Highgate, "a loose, slack, not well-dressed youth," and after
shaking hands with Keats, he said aside to Hunt, "There is death in that
hand." Nothing is extant to show that at so early a date as this, or
even for some considerable while after, any of Keats's immediate friends
shared the ominous prevision of Coleridge.

In March 1818 Keats joined his brothers at Teignmouth in Devonshire, and
in April "Endymion" was published. In June he set off on a pedestrian
tour of some extent with a friend whose name will frequently recur from
this point forwards, Charles Armitage Brown. One is generally inclined
to get some idea of what a man was like; if one knows what he was
_un_like much the same purpose is served. In April 1819 Keats wrote
some bantering verses about Brown, which are understood to go mainly by
contraries we therefore infer Brown to have presented a physical and
moral aspect the reverse of the following--

"He is to meet a melancholy carle,
Thin in the waist, with bushy head of hair,