[39] The text of this letter is described by its American editor (who seems to have mistaken the order of one or two passages) as written in an evident hurry and almost illegible.
[40] Mr. Kingston was a Commissioner of Stamps, an acquaintance and tiresome hanger-on of Wordsworth.
[41] For a more glowing account of this supper party of December 28, 1817, compare Haydon, Autobiography, i. p. 384. The Mr. Ritchie referred to started on a Government mission to Fezzan in September 1818, and died at Morzouk the following November. An account of the expedition was published by his travelling companion, Captain G. F. Lyon, R.N.
[42] The manager: of whom Macready in his Reminiscences has so much that is pleasant to say.
[43] Tea-merchant, of Pancras Lane and Walthamstow: guardian to the Keats brothers and their sister.
[44] Of course a mere delusion; but Hunt and those of his circle retained for years afterwards an impression that Scott had in some way inspired or encouraged the Cockney School articles.
[45] Alluding to two sonnets of Reynolds On Robin Hood, copies of which Keats had just received from him by post. They were printed in the Yellow Dwarf (edited by John Hunt) for February 21, 1818, and again in the collection of poems published by Reynolds in 1821 under the title A Garden of Florence.
[46] Both the Robin Hood and the Mermaid lines as afterwards printed vary in several places from these first drafts.
[47] Henry Crabb Robinson, author of the Diaries.
[48] The Olliers (Shelley’s publishers) had brought out Keats’s Poems the previous spring, and the ill success of the volume had led to a sharp quarrel between them and the Keats brothers.