r of a livery-stable in London, who was born on the 29th October,
1795.

Keats was a sensitive and pugnacious youth; and in 1810, after a very
moderate education, he was apprenticed to a surgeon; but the love of
poetry soon interfered with the surgery, and he began to read, not without
the spirit of emulation, the works of the great poets--Chaucer, Spenser,
Shakspeare, and Milton. After the issue of a small volume which attracted
little or no attention, he published his _Endymion_ in 1818, which, with
some similarity in temperament, he inscribed to the memory of Thomas
Chatterton. It is founded upon the Greek mythology, and is written in a
varied measure. Its opening line has been a familiar quotation since:

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

It was assailed by all the critics; but particularly, although not
unfairly, by Jeffrey, in the _Edinburgh Review_. An article in
_Blackwood_, breathing the spirit of British caste, had the bad taste to
tell the young apothecary to go back to his galley-pots. The excessive
sensibility of Keats received a great shock from this treatment; but we
cannot help thinking that too much stress has been laid upon this in
saying that he was killed by it. This was more romantic than true. He was
by inheritance consumptive, and had lost a brother by that disease. Add to
this that his peculiar passions and longings took the form of fierce
hypochondria.

With a decided originality, he was so impressible that there are in his
writings traces of the authors whom he was reading, if he did not mean to
make them models of style.

In 1820 he published a volume containing _Lamia_, _Isabella_, and _The Eve
of St. Agnes_, and _Hyperion_, a fragment, which was received with far
greater favor by the reviewers. Keats was self-reliant, and seems to have
had something of that magnificent egotism which is not infrequently
displayed by great minds.

The judicious verdict at last pronounced upon him may be thus epitomized:
he was a poet with fine fancy, original ideas, felicity of expression, but
full of faults due to his individuality and his youth; and his life was
not spared to correct these. In 1820 a hemorrhage of brilliant arterial
blood heralded the end. He himself said, "Bring me a candle; let me see
this blood;" and when it was brought, added, "I cannot be deceived in that
color; that drop is my death-warrant: I must die." By advice he went to
Italy, where he grew rapidly worse, and died on