-readable and picturesque as they are--I have not adequate space.
He preferred, on the whole, the Scotch people to the little which he saw
of the Irish. Just as Keats was leaving Scotland, because of his own
ailments, he had been summoned away thence on account of the more
visibly grave malady of his brother Tom, who was in an advanced stage of
consumption; but it appears that the letter did not reach his hands at
the time.

The next three months were passed by Keats along with Tom at their
Hampstead lodgings. Anxiety and affection--warm affection, deep
anxiety--were of no avail. Tom died at the beginning of December, aged
just twenty, and was buried on the 7th of that month. The words in "King
Lear," "Poor Tom," remain underlined by the surviving brother.

John Keats was now solitary in the world. Tom was dead, George and his
bride in America, Fanny, his girlish sister, a permanent inmate of the
household of Mr. and Mrs. Abbey at Walthamstow. In December he quitted
his lodgings at Hampstead, and set up house along with Mr. Brown in what
was then called Wentworth Place, Hampstead, now Lawn Bank; Brown being
rightly the tenant, and Keats a paying resident with Brown. Wentworth
Place consisted of only two houses. One of them was thus inhabited by
Brown and Keats, the other by the Dilkes. In the first of these houses,
when Brown and Keats were away, and afterwards in the second, there was
also a well-to-do family of the name of Brawne,--a mother, with a son
and two daughters. Lawn Bank is the penultimate house on the right of
John Street, next to Wentworth House: Dr. Sharpey passed some of his
later years in it. This is, beyond all others, the dwelling which
remains permanently linked with the memory of Keats.

While Tom was still lingering out the days of his brief life, Keats made
the acquaintance of two young ladies. He has left us a description of
both of them. His portraiture of the first, Miss Jane Cox, is written in
a tone which might seem the preliminary to a _grande passion_; but this
did not prove so; she rapidly passed out of his existence and out of his
memory. His portraiture of the second, Miss Fanny Brawne, does not
suggest anything beyond a tepid liking which might perhaps merge into a
definite antipathy; this also was delusive, for he was from the first
smitten with Miss Brawne, and soon profoundly in love with her--I might
say desperately in love, for indeed desperation, which became despair,
was the ma