Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/243

12 s. i. MAR. is, i9i6.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

237 of the West; that he was exiled a third time viz., to Upper Egypt, and that he wrote his 'Vita Antonii' there, c. 360: "Cet ouvrage fut écrit à la demande des moines de l'Oc- cident et leur fut dédié" (p. 64). It was turned into Latin c. 380.

With respect to St. Victricius, Dom Gougaud remarks:

"Rouen possédait, à la fin du quatrième siècle, un monastère d'hommes et un chorus virginum. Il est possible, d'après l'historien de saint Victrice, que ce soit à Trèves que l'évêque rouennais ait emprunté la règle de ses moines (v. É Vacandard, 'Saint Victrice évêque de Rouen, Paris, 1903). Peut-être Victrice apporta-t-il lui-même, en Grande-Bretagne quelques germes de ce monachisme issu des enseignements de saint Athanase."

St. Victricius of Rouen visited the Britannias in 395, and in a little article I contributed to Ériu: the Journal of the School of Irish Learning, in 1912, vol. vii. p. 13, I gave reasons for believing that the Victorious, or Victoricius (MS. C), mentioned by St. Patrick in his 'Confessio,' was the Bishop of Rouen.

(12 S. i. 108.)—Perhaps not all these notes may have been pointed out to your correspondent seeking for Keats's religion.

Mr. W. Rossetti, in his 'Keats,' p. 157, concludes that Keats does not appear to have ever made any pretence to defined religious belief of any sort, nor seriously to have debated the subject, or troubled his mind about it one way or the other.

The following notes, whether they support that conclusion or not, may help towards finding a right judgment, in so far as such is to be found.

1816, Christmas Eve, Keats (æt. 21) wrote 'On a Summer Evening':—

1818. To a clerical student, Bailey:—

There is the passage from Haydon, as already quoted: Keats "had a tendency to religion when first [1816] I knew him; but Leigh Hunt soon forced it from his mind."

1820. At the end, Keats wrote to Miss Brawne: "I long to believe in immortality."

It is more than probable that Keats was not a Christian in any dogmatic sense, but there are passages in his letters which make it difficult to regard him as a mere deist, if by " deist " we mean one who rejects the idea of a divine providence ; and there is one passage, at least, in which he expresses an intense admiration for the character of Jesus. Such expressions as : " I was resolved not to write till I should be on the mending hand ; thank God, I am so now " (to his sister, Feb. 7, 1820) ; and " two or three such Poems, if God should spare me, written in the course of the next six years " (to John Taylor, Nov. 17, 1819) ; and the agonized cry : " O, God ! God ! God ! " in his last letter but one to Brown these, surely, are something more than deistical. The other passage to which I have referred is too long to quote fully. He is writing to his brother George and his wife, and speaking of com-

te disinterestedness of mind and a pure desire for the benefit of others, he says :

" What I heard, a little time ago, Taylor observe with respect to Socrates, may be said of Jesus jhat he was so great a man that though he transmitted no writing of his own to posterity, ve have his Mind and his sayings and his grea'tness landed to us by others. It is to be lamented /hat the history of the latter was written and evised by Men interested in the pious frauds 6f Religion. Yet through all this I see his iplendour."

He goes on to speak of himself as

' straining at particles of light in the midst of - great darkness, without knowing the bearing f any one assertion, of any one opinion " ;

r et he hopes that in this he may be " free rom sin." See Forman's ' Complete Works f John Keats,' vol. v. pp. 37, 38 (Gowans

& Gray, 1901). His sympathy with Carlile he deist, as expressed in the letter of

Sept. 17, 1819, to his brother George, was evidently in part political, but no doubt he hared to a great extent in the free religious >pinions of his friend Hunt and others. At he same time he had an ardent friendship or and admiration of Bailey, whose character, e said, " does hold and grasp the tip-top f any spiritual honours that can be paid o anything in this world." In a letter to his friend, printed by Lord Houghton under

date " Teignmouth, Sept., 1818," but which