e _estrif_
in the artificial taste of the time. But errors of this sort, which any
encyclopaedia can correct, are perfectly unimportant.

Byron's sneer at Keats, as "a tadpole of the Lakes," was ridiculously
wide of the mark. He was nearly of the second generation of romantics;
he was only three years old when "The Ancient Mariner" was published;
"Christabel" and Scott's metrical romances had all been issued before he
put forth his first volume. But though he owes much to Coleridge[29] and
more perhaps to Chatterton, he took no imprint from Wordsworth, and cared
nothing for Scott. Keats, like his friend Hunt, turned instinctively
away from northern to southern Gothic; from rough border minstrelsy to
the mythology and romance of the races that dwelt about the midland sea.
Keats' sensuous nature longed for "a beaker full of the warm South." "I
have tropical blood in my veins," wrote Hunt, deprecating "the criticism
of a Northern climate" as applied to his "Story of Rimini." Keats' death
may be said to have come to him from Scotland, not only by reason of the
brutal attacks in _Blackwood's_--to which there is some reason for
believing that Scott was privy--but because the hardships and exposure of
his Scotch tour laid the foundation of his fatal malady. He brought back
no literary spoils of consequence from the North, and the description of
the journey in his letters makes it evident that his genius could not
find itself there. This uncomfortable feeling of alienation is expressed
in his "Sonnet on Visiting the Tomb of Burns." The Scotch landscape
seems "cold--strange."

"The short-lived paly Summer is but won
From Winter's ague."

And in the letter from Dumfries, enclosing the sonnet he writes: "I know
not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-Grecian and
anti-Charlemagnish." _Charlemagnish_ is Keats' word for the true
mediaeval-romantic. It is noteworthy that Keats avoided Scott's
favourite verse forms. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is not in the minstrel
ballad measure; and when Keats uses the eight-syllabled couplet, he uses
it very differently from Scott, without the alternate riming which
prevails in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and all the rest of the series.

A spark from Spenser kindled the flame of poetry in Keats. His friend,
Cowden Clarke, read him the "Epithalamium" one day in 1812 in an arbour
in the old school garden at Enfield, and lent him a copy of "The Faery
Qu