[8] I observe this name occurring once elsewhere in relation to Keats, but am not clear whose house it represents.
[9] It has been suggested (by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as printed in Mr. Forman’s edition of Keats) that the poem here referred to is “The Eve of St. Mark.” Keats had begun it fully a year and a half before the date of this letter, but, not having continued it, he might have spoken of “having it in his head.”
[10] This may require a word of explanation. Keats, detained at Portsmouth by stress of weather, had landed for a day, and seen his friend Mr. Snook, at Bedhampton. Brown was then in Chichester, only ten miles off, but of this Keats had not at the time been aware.
[11] The — before “you” appears in the letter, as printed in Mr. Forman’s edition of Keats. It might seem that Keats hesitated a moment whether to write “you” or “Miss Brawne.”
[12] No such letter is known. It has been stated that Keats, after leaving home, could never summon up resolution enough to write to Miss Brawne: possibly this statement ought to be limited to the time after he had reached Italy.
[13] Lord Houghton says that Keats in Naples “could not bear to go to the opera, on account of the sentinels who stood constantly on the stage:” he spoke of “the continual visible tyranny of this government,” and said “I will not leave even my bones in the midst of this despotism.” Sentinels on the stage have, I believe, been common in various parts of the continent, as a mere matter of government parade, or of routine for preserving public order. The other points (for which no authority is cited by Lord Houghton) must, I think, be over-stated. In November 1820 the short-lived constitution of the kingdom of Naples was in full operation, and neither tyranny nor despotism was in the ascendant—rather a certain degree of popular license.
[14] The reader of Keats’s preface will note that this is a misrepresentation. Keats did not speak of any fierce hell of criticism, nor did he ask to remain uncriticized in order that he might write more. What he said was that a feeling critic would not fall foul of him for hoping to write good poetry in the long run, and would be aware that Keats’s own sense of failure in “Endymion” was as fierce a hell as he could be chastised by.
[15] This phrase stands printed with inverted commas, as a quotation. It is not, however, a quotation from the letter of J. S.
[16] “Coolness” (which seems to be the right word) in the letter to Miss Mitford.
[17] Severn’s view of the matter some years afterwards has however received record in the diary of Henry Crabb Robinson. Under the date May 6, 1837, we read—“He [Severn] denies that Keats’s death was hastened by the article in the Quarterly.”