soriousness--to the effect that, both as girl and
woman, she "was a person of unbridled temperament, and that in her later
years she fell into loose ways, and was no credit to the family." That
she had other qualities besides those mentioned by the tea-dealer is
shown by the passionate affection that existed between her and her son
John. "Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be kept quiet
during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her
door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in." As she lay dying,
"he sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer nobody
to give her medicine, or even cook her food, but himself, and read
novels to her in her intervals of ease." The Keats children were
fortunately not left penniless. Their grandfather, the proprietor of the
livery-stable, had bequeathed a fortune of L13,000, a little of which
was spent on sending Keats to a good school till the age of sixteen, and
afterwards enabled him to attend Guy's Hospital as a medical student.

It is almost impossible to credit the accepted story that he passed all
his boyhood without making any attempt at writing poetry. "He did not
begin to write," says Sir Sidney Colvin, "till he was near eighteen." If
this is so, one feels all the more grateful to his old schoolfellow,
Cowden Clarke, who lent him _The Faery Queene_, with a long list of
other books, and in doing so presented him with the key that unlocked
the unsuspected treasure of his genius. There is only one person,
indeed, in all the Keats circle to whom one is more passionately
grateful than to Cowden Clarke: that is Fanny Brawne. Keats no doubt had
laboured to some purpose--occasionally, to fine purpose--with his genius
before the autumn of 1818, when he met Fanny Brawne for the first time.
None the less, had he died before that date, he would have been
remembered in literature not as a marvellous original artist, but rather
as one of those "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" among whom Shelley
surprisingly placed him. Fanny Brawne may (or may not) have been the bad
fairy of Keats as a man. She was unquestionably his good fairy as a
poet.

This is the only matter upon which one is seriously disposed to quarrel
with Sir Sidney Colvin as a biographer. He does not emphasize as he
ought the debt we are under to Fanny Brawne as the intensifier of
Keats's genius--the "minx," as Keats irritably called her, who
transformed him in a few months