[49] Georgiana Wylie, to whom George Keats was engaged.
[50] This letter has been hitherto erroneously printed under date September 1818.
[51] Reading doubtful.
[52] The five lines ending here Keats afterwards re-cast, doubtless in order to get rid of the cockney rhyme “ports” and “thoughts.”
[53] “And, sweetheart, lie thou there”:—Pistol (to his sword) in Henry IV., Part 2, II. iv.
[54] Replying to an ecstatic note of Haydon’s about a seal with a true lover’s knot and the initials W. S., lately found in a field at Stratford-on-Avon.
[55] Dentatus was the subject of Haydon’s new picture.
[56] The famous picture now belonging to Lady Wantage, and exhibited at Burlington House in 1888. Whether Keats ever saw the original is doubtful (it was not shown at the British Institution in his time), but he must have been familiar with the subject as engraved by Vivarès and Woollett, and its suggestive power worked in his mind until it yielded at last the distilled poetic essence of the “magic casement” passage in the Ode to a Nightingale. It is interesting to note the theme of the Grecian Urn ode coming in also amidst the “unconnected subject and careless verse” of this rhymed epistle.
[57] Sic: probably, as suggested by Mr. Forman, for “I hope what you achieve is not lost upon me.”
[58] The English rebels against tradition in poetry and art at this time took much the same view of the French dramatists of the grand siècle as was taken by the romantiques of their own nation a few years later; and Haydon had written to Keats in his last letter, “When I die I’ll have Shakspeare placed on my heart, with Homer in my right hand and Ariosto in the other, Dante at my head, Tasso at my feet, and Corneille under my ——”