[1] Later occupants re-named the place Lawn Bank and threw the two semi-detached houses into one, making alterations and additions the exact nature of which were pointed out to me in 1885 by Mr William Dilke, the then surviving brother of Keats’s friend. This gentleman also showed me a house across the road which he himself had built in early life, occupied for a while, and then let on a sixty years’ lease: ‘which lease,’ he added, as though to outlive a sixty years’ agreement contracted at thirty were the most ordinary occurrence in the world, ‘fell in a year or two ago.’ He died shortly afterwards, aged 93. He and Mrs Procter, the widow of Barry Cornwall the poet—staunchest, wittiest, and youngest-hearted defier of Time that she was—were the only two persons I have known and spoken to who had known and spoken to Keats.
[2] The only set of engravings existing in Keats’s time after pictures at Milan was the Raccolta, etc., of G. Zanconi (1813), which gives only panels and canvases by masters of the full Renaissance in private collections.
[3] The fullest and, it must be said, least favourable account we have of her is in the retrospect of a cousin who had frequented her mother’s house as a young boy about 1819-20, and seventy years later gave his impressions as follows (New York Herald, April 12, 1889). ‘Miss Fanny Brawne was very fond of admiration. I do not think she cared for Keats, although she was engaged to him. She was very much affected when he died, because she had treated him so badly. She was very fond of dancing, and of going to the opera and to balls and parties. Miss Brawne’s mother had an extensive acquaintance with gentlemen, and the society in which they mingled was musical and literary. Through the Dilkes, Miss Brawne was invited out a great deal, and as Keats was not in robust health enough to take her out himself (for he never went with her), she used to go with military men to the Woolwich balls and to balls in Hampstead; and she used to dance with these military officers a great deal more than Keats liked. She did not seem to care much for him. Mr Dilke, the grandfather of the present Sir Charles Dilke, admired her very much in society, and although she was not a great beauty she was very lively and agreeable. I remember that among those frequenting Mrs Brawne’s house in Hampstead were a number of foreign gentlemen. Keats could not talk French as they could, and their conversation with his fiancée in a language he could not understand was a source of continual disagreement between them. Keats thought that she talked and flirted and danced too much with them, but his remonstrances were all unheeded by Miss Brawne.’ Against these impressions should be set Brown’s testimony, contained in letters of the time to Severn and others, to her signs of acute distress on the news coming from Italy of the hopelessness of her lover’s condition and finally of his death: and stronger still, her own words written in later years to Medwin, which seem to show a true, and even tender, understanding of his character if not of his genius (see below p. 465).
| ἔρος δ᾽ αὖτε μ᾽ ὁ λυοιμέλης δονεῖ γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὀρπετόν.—Sappho, Fr. 40. |
[5] There is no autograph of this ode, only transcripts by friends, and Mr Buxton Forman was most likely right in suggesting that the true reading for ‘not’ should be ‘out.’
[6] Keats was staying that night and two more at Mr Taylor’s in London: but there is nothing against my theory in this: he might have composed the sonnet as well in Fleet Street as at Hampstead.
[7] In his printed account of the matter Clarke calls the victim definitely a kitten, and says of Keats: ‘He thought he should be beaten, for the fellow was the taller and stronger; but like an authentic pugilist, my young poet found that he had planted a blow which “told” upon his antagonist; in every succeeding round therefore (for they fought nearly an hour), he never failed of returning to the weak point, and the contest ended in the hulk being led home.’
[8] Joseph Henry Green, afterwards F.R.S. and Professor of Anatomy to the Royal Academy; distinguished alike as a teacher in his own profession and as a disciple and interpreter of Coleridge’s philosophy.