VII.--CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS.

Poems 1817

Endymion 1818

Lamia, etc. 1820

Life, letters, and literary remains 1848

Letters to Fanny Brawne 1878

Letters 1883

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: A small point here may deserve a note. A letter from John
Keats to his brother George, under date of September 21st, 1819,
contains the following words: "Our bodies, every seven years, are
completely fresh-materialed: seven years ago it was not this hand that
clenched itself against Hammond." Another version of the same letter
(the true wording of which is matter of some dispute) substitutes: "Mine
is not the same hand I clenched at Hammond's." Mr. Buxton Forman, who
gives the former phrase as the genuine one, thinks that "this phrase
points to a serious rupture as the cause of his quitting his
apprenticeship to Hammond." My own inclination is to surmise that the
accurate reading may be--"It was not this hand that clenched itself
against Hammond's"; indicating, not any quarrel, but the friendly
habitual clasp of hand against hand. "Seven years ago" would reach back
to September 1812: whereas Keats did not part from Hammond until 1814.]

[Footnote 2: This is Hunt's own express statement. It has been disputed,
but I am not prepared to reject it.]

[Footnote 3: Biographers have been reticent on this subject. Keats's
statement however speaks for itself, and a high medical authority, Dr.
Richardson, writing in _The Asclepiad_ for April 1884, and reviewing the
whole subject of the poet's constitutional and other ailments, says that
Keats in Oxford "runs loose, and pays a forfeit for his indiscretion
which ever afterwards physically and morally embarrasses him." He
pronounces that Keats's early death was "expedited, perhaps excited, by
his own imprudence," but was substantially due to hereditary disease.
His mother, as we have already seen, had died of the malady which killed
the poet, consumption. It is not clear to me what Keats meant by saying
that "from his _employment_" his health would be insecure. One might
suppose that he was thinking of the long and haphazard working hours of
a young surgeon or medical man; in which case, this seems to be the
latest instance in which he spoke of himself as still be