enteen,' was wrong here; 'not nineteen' would have been
correct, as she was born on August 9, 1800.] But she is ignorant,
monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions; calling
people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the
term 'minx.' This is, I think, from no innate vice, but from a
penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am, however, tired of
such style, and shall decline any more of it. She had a friend to
visit her lately. You have known plenty such. She plays the
music, but without one sensation but the feel of the ivory at her
fingers. She is a downright Miss, without one set-off. We hated
her ["We" would apparently be Keats, Brown, and the Dilkes], and
smoked her, and baited her, and I think drove her away. Miss
Brawne thinks her a paragon of fashion, and says she is the only
woman in the world she would change persons with. What a stupe!
She is as superior as a rose to a dandelion."

At the time when Keats wrote these words he had known Miss Brawne for a
couple of months, more or less, having first seen her in October or
November at the house of the Dilkes. It might seem that he was about
this time in a state of feeling propense to love. _Some_ woman was
required to fill the void in his heart. The woman might have been Miss
Cox, whom he met in September. As the event turned out, it was not she,
but it _was_ Miss Brawne, whom he met in October or November. Fanny
Brawne was the elder daughter of a gentleman of independent means, who
died while she was still a child; he left another daughter and a son
with their mother; and the whole family, as already mentioned, lived at
times in the same house which the Dilkes occupied in Wentworth-place,
Hampstead, and at other times in the adjoining house, while not tenanted
by Brown and Keats. Miss Brawne (I quote here from Mr. Forman) "had much
natural pride and buoyancy, and was quite capable of affecting higher
spirits and less concern than she really felt. But, as to the
genuineness of her attachment to Keats, some of those who knew her
personally have no doubt whatever."[5] If so--or indeed whether so or
not--it is a pity that she was wont, after Keats's death, to speak of
him (as has been averred) as "that foolish young poet who was in love
with me." That Keats was a poet and a young poet is abundantly true; but
that he was a foolish one had even before his death, and especially very
soon after it, be