[30] I am unable to obtain or suggest any explanation of the allusion made in this strange sentence. It is not, however, impossible that “the Bishop” was merely a nickname of some one in the Hampstead circle.
[31] The Tragedy referred to is, of course, Otho the Great, which was composed jointly by Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown. For the first four acts Brown provided the characters, plot, &c., and Keats found the language; but the fifth act is wholly Keats’s. See Lord Houghton’s Life, Letters, &c. (1848), Vol. II, pp. 1 and 2, and foot-note at p. 333 of the Aldine edition of Keats’s Poetical Works (Bell & Sons, 1876). A humorous account of the progress of the joint composition occurs in a letter written by Brown to Dilke, which is quoted at p. 9 of the memoir prefixed by Sir Charles Dilke to The Papers of a Critic, referred to in the Introduction to the present volume, [p. lviii].
[32] He did not find one; for, in a letter to B. R. Haydon, dated Winchester, 3 October, 1819, he says: “I came to this place in the hopes of meeting with a Library, but was disappointed.” For this letter see Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk (Two volumes, Chatto and Windus, 1875), Vol. II, p. 16, and also Lord Houghton’s Life, Letters, &c. (1848), Vol. II, p. 10, where there is an extract from the letter somewhat differently worded and arranged.
[33] The discrepancy between the date written by Keats and that given in the postmark is curious as a comment on his statement (Life, Letters, &c., 1848, Vol. I, p. 253) that he never knew the date: “It is some days since I wrote the last page, but I never know....”
[34] This word is of course left as found in the original letter: an editor who should spell it yacht would be guilty of representing Keats as thinking what he did not think.
[35] Written, I presume, from the house of his friends and publishers, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, No. 93, Fleet Street.
[36] Whether he carried out this intention to the letter, I know not; but he would seem to have been at Winchester again, at all events, by the 22nd of September, on which day he was writing thence to Reynolds (Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 23).
[37] It would seem to have been in this street that Mr. Dilke obtained for Keats the rooms which the poet asked him to find in the letter of the 1st of October, from Winchester, given at p. 16, Vol. II, of the Life, Letters, &c. (1848). How long Keats remained in those rooms I have been unable to determine, to a day; but in Letter No. IX he writes, eight days later, from Great Smith Street (the address of Mr. Dilke) that he purposes “living at Hampstead”; and there is a letter headed “Wentworth Place, Hampstead, 17th Nov. [1819.]” at p. 35, Vol. II, of the Life, Letters, &c.
[38] It may be that consideration for his correspondent induced this moderation of speech: presumably the scene here referred to is that so graphically given in Lord Houghton’s Life (Vol. II, pp. 53-4), where we read, not that he merely “felt it possible” he “might not survive,” but that he said to his friend, “I know the colour of that blood,—it is arterial blood—I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop is my death-warrant. I must die.”
[39] This sentence indicates the lapse of perhaps about a week from the 3rd of February, 1820.