friends was not less impressed by his gifts, and confident of his future, than affectionately attached to his person, dissuaded him from these ideas, and advanced him means to employ the coming summer at any rate in literature. Keats accordingly went to join his friend Rice at Shanklin, where Brown soon joined them. Brown and Keats now got to work conjointly on a tragedy on the subject of Otho the Great; Brown, who had some previous experience of writing for the stage, undertaking the plot and construction, Keats the dialogue. At the same time Keats began upon a new narrative poem of his own, 'Lamia.' Finding the air of Shanklin too relaxing, the two friends, after five weeks' stay, moved (12 Aug.) to Winchester. Here Keats stayed for two months, during which (the season being peculiarly fine) he was better in health, quieter in mind, and steadier in industry than he had been for long previously, or was destined ever to be again. His letters to Fanny Brawne from Shanklin and Winchester show how great a strain his passion put on him, but in the absence of its object he was able to control himself, and to find pleasure both in outdoor nature and in work. He finished 'Otho the Great' with Brown, began by himself a new tragedy on the subject of King Stephen, finished 'Lamia,' added to the fragment of the 'Eve of St. Mark,' which had been begun at Chichester, and composed the beautiful ode 'To Autumn.' 'Hyperion' he had not touched since the preceding April, probably not since January, and now he finally made up his mind to break it off, as being too artificial and Miltonic in style. He was at the same time busy studying Italian, and writing at great length to his brother and sister-in-law in America. His letters of the end of September and beginning of October are full of manly spirit and of the determination to cease fretting, and face life bravely and sanely. He again formed a plan of living by himself in London and making a livelihood, pending some success with plays or poems, by writing for the press. 'I will write, on the liberal side of the question, for whoever will pay me. I purpose living in town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring, for a beginning, to get the theatricals of some paper.' Dilke, who had at this time left Hampstead, and was living in Westminster, at Keats's request accordingly took for him a lodging in his own neighbourhood, at 25 College Street. Hither Keats moved about 10 Oct. But the resolutions formed with the manly and voluntary part of his nature were instantly sapped by the sources of consumptive and hypochondriac disease within him. He paid a visit to the Brawnes at Wentworth Place, and fell more hopelessly than ever under the spell of passion. To be near his love he left his lodgings at Westminster, and settled again (16 Oct.) with Brown next door to her; and from this time forth he knew neither peace of mind nor health of body again.
'Otho the Great' was about this time offered to and provisionally accepted by Elliston, the manager of Drury Lane. Crude as the play is in character and construction, it is written with great splendour and vitality of poetic imagery and diction, and the part of Ludolf might have given opportunities to Kean, for whom it was designed. But Elliston proposing to keep it over until the next year, the authors took back the manuscript, and submitted it to the management of Covent Garden, by whom it was presently returned unopened. 'The writing a few fine plays,' says Keats in a letter to his publisher 17 Nov. 1819, 'is still my greatest ambition, when I do feel ambitious, which is very seldom.' Illness and despondency were in the meantime growing on him fast. One or two piteous love-plaints in verse were addressed at this time to Fanny Brawne, and have been posthumously published. At other poetical work also be laboured for a while hard, but to little purpose. The success of Byron with 'Beppo' and 'Don Juan,' together with his own studies in Italian literature, had suggested to him the idea of writing a fairy poem with satirical touches on the events of the day. This he planned and began accordingly, under the name of the 'Cap and Bells' and the feigned authorship of 'Lucy Vaughan Lloyd,' continuing with great facility to the length of eighty-eight stanzas (in the Spenserian metre); but the work bears few marks of his genius. He at the same time took up 'Hyperion' again, and began amplifying and recasting it with an elaborate allegoric preamble in the form of a 'Vision.' The chief interest of this recast (wrongly given in nearly all editions as a first version) lies in its great inferiority to the original poem, and in the bitterness of despondency concerning the vocation and destiny of poets to which it gives expression. During these weeks he went little abroad, and the friends who came to see him began to perceive that he had 'lost his cheerfulness.' His genial house-mate Brown was especially distressed by the signs of 'rooted misery' which he observed and could do nothing to alleviate. That Keats at this time sought relief to some extent in dissipation, with a consequent aggravation of his maladies, seems certain, although Haydon's tale that
