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 attachment with which he requited her. Both parents were ambitious for their sons, and John was put, apparently in his eighth year, to a school of excellent repute kept by John Clarke at Enfield, whither he was in due course followed by his younger brothers George and Tom. Very soon afterwards he lost his father, who was killed by a fall from his horse on the night of 15-16 April 1804. Within a year the widow took a second husband, one William Rawlings, described as 'of Moorgate, in the city of London, stablekeeper,' presumably therefore the successor of Thomas Keats in the management of her father's business. This marriage, which was without issue, turned out unhappily, and was quickly followed by a separation. Of William Rawlings nothing more is heard. Mrs. Rawlings went with the children of her first marriage to live at Edmonton with her mother, Mrs. Jennings, who had lately been left a widow and was comfortably off (John Jennings died on 8 March 1805, leaving a fortune of about 13,000l.) The boyhood of Keats, from his tenth to his fifteenth year, was accordingly spent in circumstances of sufficient ease and pleasantness between his grandmother's house in Church Street, Edmonton, and the school at Enfield. He was fortunate in securing the friendship of the master's son, [q.v.], who was an usher in the school, and has left a vivid account of Keats's boyish character and ways. Other witnesses of his school life are his younger brother George (who was from childhood the bigger, stronger, and sedater of the two) and his schoolfellow, [q.v.], author of the 'Life of Mozart.' He is described with one consent as a lad of extraordinary mettle, vivacity, and promise. Cowden Clarke says he was the favourite of all, 'like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage,' and no less for 'his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity.' Holmes dwells on 'the generosity and daring of his character, with the extreme beauty and animation of his face.' George Keats adds, what we know also from his own confession, that he was nevertheless subject from a child to secret moods of groundless suspicion and self-torment, from which he used to find relief by unbosoming himself to his brothers, but to no one else. During the first three or four years of his life at school his bent was all towards fighting and frolic; but during the following two years the love of study seized him, and he could hardly be torn from his books, not only winning all the literature prizes of the school, but devouring during play hours everything he could lay his hands on in the shape of literature, criticism, and especially of classical mythology. The acquirements which he carried away from school were a fair working knowledge of Latin and general history, with apparently some acquaintance with French, which he afterwards improved. His insight into the Greek spirit came by nature, not by learning, and he knew nothing of the language.

When Keats was about fourteen his mother, who had long suffered from chronic rheumatism, was attacked in the lungs and went into a rapid decline. The boy nursed her on her deathbed with extreme devotion. She died in February 1810, and in the July following Mrs. Jennings, then aged 74, executed a deed putting her orphan grandchildren under the care of two guardians, Mr. Rowland Sandell, merchant, and Mr. Richard Abbey, tea-dealer, to whom she made over a sum of approximately 8,000l. to be held in trust for their use. Mr. Abbey seems to have taken up from the beginning the entire responsibility of the trust. Under his authority John Keats was withdrawn from school at the completion of his fifteenth year (i. e. the end of 1810), and articled apprentice for five years to a surgeon named Hammond at Edmonton. This employment left him leisure to pay frequent visits, especially on summer afternoons, to his old school at Enfield. Here he was always warmly welcomed by young Cowden Clarke, who continued to encourage and direct the lad's studies in English literature, especially in the Elizabethan dramatists and poets. It was Spenser's 'Faery Queene' that above all roused the boyish enthusiasm of Keats, and fired him, as it has fired others at his age, with the ambition of writing poetry himself. His lines 'in imitation of Spenser' (really rather of Spenser's later imitators, such as Beattie and the more recently fashionable Mrs. Tighe) are said to have been the first he wrote, and are variously ascribed to his sixteenth or his eighteenth year. Other efforts followed, some apparently inspired by Gray, others by Tom Moore, but none showing much taste or promise. Many poets much less gifted than Keats have begun both earlier and better. 'An idle, loafing fellow, always writing poetry,' is the account of him at this time given in after-life by a fellow-student under Hammond who had never deviated into the paths of literature. Whether his rhyming propensities really interfered with his industry, or whether his sensitive pride resented some slight put upon him, the pupil and his master by-and-by quarrelled, the indentures were broken by consent, and Keats went to