ence the above
canons are taken."

In a manuscript note on this passage made after Keats' death, Byron
wrote: "My indignation at Mr. Keats' depreciation of Pope has hardly
permitted me to do justice to his own genius. . . . He is a loss to our
literature, and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to
have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was
reforming his style upon the more classical models of the language,"
Keats made a study of Dryden's versification before writing "Lamia"; but
had he lived to the age of Methusaleh, he would not have "reformed his
style" upon any such classical models as Lord Byron had in mind.
Classical he might have become, in the sense in which "Hyperion" is
classical; but in the sense in which Pope was classical--never. Pope's
Homer he deliberately set aside for Chapman's--

"Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." [27]

Keats had read Virgil, but seemingly not much Latin poetry besides, and
he had no knowledge of Greek. He made acquaintance with the Hellenic
world through classical dictionaries and a study of the casts in the
British Museum. But his intuitive grasp of the antique ideal of beauty
stood him in as good stead as Landor's scholarship. In such work as
"Hyperion" and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" he mediates between the ancient
and the modern spirit, from which Landor's clear-cut marbles stand aloof
in chill remoteness. As concerns his equipment, Keats stands related to
Scott in romance learning much as he does to Landor in classical
scholarship. He was no antiquary, and naturally made mistakes of detail.
In his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," he makes Cortez,
and not Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific. _A propos_ of a line in
"The Eve of St. Agnes"--

"And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor"--

Leigh Hunt called attention to the fact that rushes and not carpets
covered the floors in the Middle Ages. In the same poem, Porphyro sings
to his lute an ancient ditty,

"In Provence called 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.'"

The ditty was by Alain Chartier, who was not a troubadour, but a Norman
by birth and a French court poet of the fifteenth century. The title,
which Keats found in a note in an edition of Chaucer, pleased his fancy
and suggested his ballad,[28] of the same name, which has nothing in
common with Chartier's poem. The latter is a conventional lov