be on my legs, for certain sure)." However, to disabuse his publishers of the idea that he is extravagant, and to leave in their minds an impression of his diligence in regard to the book they are going to publish, he is careful to declare that he is "not desolate, but have, thank God, 25 good notes in my fob. But then, you know, I laid them by to write with and would stand at bay a fortnight ere they should grab me. In a month's time I must pay, but it would relieve my mind if I owed you, instead of these Pelican duns." At the end, comes the time-honoured formula of borrowers, "I am sure you are confident of my responsibility, and in the sense of squareness that is always in me." Keats assuredly meant to be square, but he permitted the corners of his squareness to be chipped on occasions when his financial obligations pressed. A man who cheerfully spends his quarter's allowance before it is due, and makes a practice of so doing, is not the best judge of rectangularity. It was eight months since he had attained his majority, and during that time he had been at no pains to acquaint himself with his financial position. This letter is the first of many, unhappily. That Keats should never have given a thought to the possibility that he might be straining the good will of his publishers too far, speaks volumes for their kindness and his extraordinary ignorance of the ways of the world.

On his return from Bo Peep, Keats joined his brothers in their new lodging in Well Walk, Hampstead. Exactly why the brothers moved there, no one says, but inference is not difficult. Tom was poorly housed in the thick of London smoke for a consumptive, for that he was a consumptive was becoming clearer every day; John found the peace and quiet of a suburb far better to write in than clattering Cheapside; George could reach the City without difficulty, although, as a matter of fact, he does not seem to have been obliged to reach it very long. The first letter to Severn implies that already, at the end of May, he

had no daily engagement in town. George's "pride" does not appear to have accorded well with a clerkship in anybody's employ. Hence the subsequent departure to America, where a man had but to stand on his own feet with energy and perseverance to make a fortune! Oh, the innocence, the pathetic innocence of these boys! How sorely they paid for it!

The landlord of the Well Walk lodging was a postman named Bentley. Bentley, slightly as he is sketched in Keats's letters, gives the impression of having been a good, honest sort of man, and his wife, we are told, was a kind and motherly woman, but the children were a source of some annoyance to Keats. As I have already said, Keats does not seem to have cared much for children. On one occasion, the Bentley children "are making a horrid row"; on another, Keats speaks without enthusiasm of the smell of their damp worsted stockings.

Hampstead was an almost perfect place for Keats to settle in. To be sure, Hunt was no longer in the cottage in the Vale of Health, but, considering Keats's altered feelings toward Hunt, that was rather a boon than otherwise. But, if Hunt had left Hampstead, two friends of his, whom the Keats brothers had already met through him, remained, and both these friends were destined to become very intimate with Keats as time went on, one of them, indeed, to play almost the part of a brother during the last years of Keats's life. These men were Charles Wentworth Dilke and Charles Brown.

Just when Keats first met them is not known, but it was certainly some time during the Winter of 1816-17. There are references to a party at Mrs. Dilke's to which Keats could not go, in the letter which Keats wrote to Reynolds announcing his approaching departure from London in the Spring, but we hear nothing of Brown at that date, although Keats must have made his acquaintance at about the same time that he made Dilke's.

The Dilke family were somewhat higher in the social scale than most of Keats's friends. There were Dilkes of Maxstoke Castle in Warwickshire, and Charles Wentworth Dilke, the father of Keats's friend, was the head of a younger branch of the same family. They were descendants of a Sir Peter Wentworth, who was a member of the High Court of Justice, and of a still older Sir Peter Wentworth, who had married a sister of Sir Francis Walsingham, and was the leader of the Puritan opposition under Queen Elizabeth. Dilke's father, the elder Charles Wentworth, had been in the civil service; but, when Keats knew the family, he had retired to Chichester.

Charles Wentworth Dilke was a young man of twentyseven when the Keats brothers moved to Hampstead. By profession, he was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, but his tastes were literary. He had edited a series of volumes as a continuation to Dodsley's Old Plays, the books appearing at intervals from 1814 to 1816. Dilke was also something of an antiquary, and in politics a confirmed radical, which bias induced him to advocate the repeal of the corn laws in 1821. In 1830, he undertook the editorship of the Athenæum, which had been established two years before, but was, at the time, languishing. By his energy and fearlessness, he soon put the paper on its feet and gave it the prominent position it held for many years. Later, in 1846, he became manager of the Daily News. In 1862, he left London for Hampshire, where he died in 1864. Dilke was an indefatigable writer on his favourite subjects, but published no books other than his series of edited plays. It was not until ten years after his death that his fugitive essays were gathered together by his grandson, and issued under the title, Papers of a Critic.

Dilke had a tidy, but inelastic, mind. He wished to reduce everything to a system and dogmatize from a settled basis. Keats summed him up very neatly in a letter written to his brother George in 1819: "Dilke," he says, "is a

man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about everything... Dilke will never come at a truth as long as he lives, because he is always trying it." At another time, he calls him "a Godwin-perfectability man." In spite of their total unlikeness of character, Keats and Dilke enjoyed each other's company immensely. Dilke's knowledge of books and antiquities, combined with the genial hospitality of his nature, cannot fail to have made him a pleasant, as well as an interesting, companion, while his appreciation of Blake should have had more of an effect upon Keats than it did, unless, indeed, it dates from a period subsequent to Keats's death. At any rate, a man who could appreciate Blake certainly had much in him by which Keats could profit.

Dilke married early, his son being born in 1810. This boy, the idol of his father's heart, the Charley Dilke of the letters, was therefore only seven when Keats went to live at Hampstead.

Mrs. Dilke, for no account of Dilke is complete without mention of his wife, was evidently a very charming woman. Her enthusiasm about, and friendliness for, Keats duplicated her husband's attitude. But there must have been something about her which did not lure Keats quite as far as it might have done, for, cosily intimate as Keats was with her, she never fell into the place of confidant. Perhaps the fact that Keats encountered Fanny Brawne when his acquaintance with Mrs. Dilke was scarcely more than a year old, a year in which he was much away from Hampstead, may have been the reason, rather than any lack in Mrs. Dilke's character. Her friendship with Keats drifted into one with his sister Fanny, to whom she was very attentive after Keats's death, and this friendship with Fanny Keats she kept up for years. Mrs. Dilke had a little frailty which gives the memory of her a delightfully human touch; she was unpunctual, never ready when called for by