I am sorry I have not had time to call and wish you health till my return. Really I have been hard run these last three days. However, au revoir, God keep us all well! I start tomorrow Morning. My brother Tom will I am afraid be lonely. I can scarcely ask the loan of books for him, since I still keep those you lent me a year ago. If I am overweening, you will I know be indulgent. Therefore when you shall write, do send him some you think will be most amusing—he will be careful in returning them. Let him have one of my books bound. I am ashamed to catalogue these messages. There is but one more, which ought to go for nothing as there is a lady concerned. I promised Mrs Reynolds one of my books bound. As I cannot write in it let the opposite” Carey his point. I would not forget Woodhouse. Adieu!
Your sincere friend,
John o’Grots.
June 22, 1818. Hampstead” [The date and place are added by Woodhouse in red ink, presumably from the post-mark].
[p. 120], note 1. In the concluding lines quoted in my text, Mr Buxton Forman has noticed the failure of rhyme between ‘All the magic of the place’ and the next line, ‘So saying, with a spirit’s glance,’ and has proposed, by way of improvement, to read ‘with a spirit’s grace’. I find the true explanation in Woodhouse MSS. A., where the poem is continued thus in pencil after the word ‘place’.
“’Tis now free to stupid face,
To cutters, and to fashion boats,
To cravats and to petticoats:—
The great sea shall war it down,
For its fame shall not be blown
At each farthing Quadrille dance.
So saying with a spirit’s glance
He dived”—.
Evidently Keats was dissatisfied with the first six of these lines (as he well might be), and suppressed them in copying the piece both for his correspondents and for the press: forgetting at the same time to give any indication of the hiatus so caused.
[p. 128], note 1. Lord Houghton says, “On returning to the south, Keats found his brother alarmingly ill, and immediately joined him at Teignmouth.” It is certain that no such second visit to Teignmouth was made by either brother. The error is doubtless due to the misdating of Keats’s March letter to Bailey: see last note but two, [p. 225].
[p. 138], note 1. Keats in this letter proves how imperfect was his knowledge of his own affairs, and how much those affairs had been mismanaged. At the time when he thus found himself near the end of the capital on which he had hitherto subsisted, there was another resource at his disposal of which it is evident he knew nothing. Quite apart from the provision made by Mrs Jennings for her grandchildren after her husband’s death, and administered by Mr Abbey, there were the legacies Mr Jennings himself had left them by will; one of £1000 direct; the other, of a capital to yield £50 a year, in reversion after their mother’s death (see [p. 5]). The former sum was invested by order of the Court in Consols, and brought £1550. 7s. 10d. worth of that security at the price at which it then stood. £1666. 13s. 4d. worth of the same stock was farther purchased from the funds of the estate in order to yield the income of £50 a year. The interest on both these investments was duly paid to Frances Rawlings during her life: but after her death in 1810 both investments lay untouched and accumulating interest until 1823; when George Keats, to whose knowledge their existence seems then to have been brought for the first time, received on application to the Court a fourth share of each, with its accumulations. Two years afterwards Fanny Keats received in like manner on application the remaining three shares (those of her brothers John and Tom as well as her own), the total amount paid to her being £3375. 5s. 7d., and to George £1147. 5s. 1d. It was a part of the ill luck which attended the poet always that the very existence of these funds must have been ignored or forgotten by his guardian and solicitors at the time when he most needed them.
[p. 148], note 1. Landor’s letter to Lord Houghton on receipt of a presentation copy of the Life and Letters, in 1848, begins characteristically as follows:—
“Bath, Aug. 29.