judgment have their own confession of larceny from other poets to make. While the Library Edition of 1883 was in course of production, a volume came into Mr. Buxton Forman's hands of the nature of a scrap-book or commonplace book. In fact it had been used successively for both purposes; and transcripts of poems by Keats and others, in the handwriting of George Keats, were sometimes left uncovered and sometimes covered up by scraps of various kinds pasted over them. The book appears to have belonged to Mrs. George Keats, to whom, when she was Georgiana Augusta Wylie, the poet had addressed the sonnet "To G. A. W."-of which a holograph manuscript by Keats, headed To Miss Wylie, was pasted into the book, the initials J. K. being subscribed by George Keats.

Among the poems transcribed by George is a sonnet written in sickness, which is assigned to the year 1819 and initialled J. K. The text is as follows:

Brother belov'd if health shall smile again,
Upon this wasted form and fevered cheek:
If e'er returning vigour bid these weak
And languid limbs their gladsome strength regain,
Well may thy brow the placid glow retain

Of sweet content and thy pleas'd eye may speak
The conscious self-applause, but should I seek
To utter what this heart can feel, Ah! vain
Were the attempt! Yet kindest friends while o'er
My couch ye bend, and watch with tenderness
The being whom your cares could e'en restore,
From the cold grasp of Death, say can you guess
The feelings which these lips can ne'er express;
Feelings, deep fix'd in grateful memory's store.

Misgivings as to the merits of this production as a mature work of Keats might well reduce an editor to form

a theory in justification of the acceptance of George's attribution. The theory put forward was that the date had been inserted from memory, as it was an impossible poem for that year of Keats's greatest heights in verse, and that it had been written in or about February 1820, when Keats was in a state of utter physical and mental prostration, and was actually forbidden to write. As an alternative it was suggested that the sonnet was written later in the year, when the vitality of the poet was clean gone, and that it was a reply to a letter sent by George on hearing of John's illness, a letter reproaching himself for leaving his elder brother in indifferent health, to rush back to America and endeavour to mend his own fortunes.

The originator of that theory has now found occasion to repent that he accepted even such good evidence as that of George Keats, whose high intelligence and complete intimacy with his brother left but little room, it is true, to do otherwise. Nevertheless, the fact that George was wrong has been wrung by the afore-named holy inquisition from one of Keats's well-nigh forgotten literary heroines, who, duly racked, has revealed the truth. In Keats's early poem To Some Ladies occur the funny stanzas :

If a cherub on pinions of silver descending

Had brought me a gem from the fretwork of heaven;
And smiles, with his star-cheering voice sweetly blending,
The blessings of Tighe had melodiously given;

It had not created a warmer emotion

Than the present, fair nymphs, I was blest with from you,
Than the shell, from the bright golden sands of the ocean
Which the emerald waves at your feet gladly threw.

Poor Mrs. Tighe! She had had her Psyche, or the

Legend of Love, printed for private distribution in 1805, in an exquisite little pocket volume produced at the Chiswick press, and now of extreme rarity. She had died in 1810, at the comparatively early age of thirty-six; and in 1811 Psyche with a few minor poems and sonnets had been placed before the public in a sumptuous quarto volume with such adornment of frontispiece as the skill of the once renowned engraver to Queen Charlotte, the modest and retiring Caroline Watson, could convey from Romney's portrait of the poetess, as copied by John Camerford the miniaturist. Either this volume or one of the many octavo reprints of it Keats had certainly read; for the traces of the influence of Psyche, a poem well worth reading even now for its individual charm, are clearly stamped upon his own thought. But he must have done more than read Psyche: he must, one would think, have copied out, for his own edification or that of his brothers, the sonnet printed above, which occurs in the quarto of 1811, and also at page 237 of the octavo of the same and later dates, headed "Addressed to my Brother, 1805." "Must have copied " is scarcely too strong an expression; for how else can George Keats have been misled into the supposition that it was the work of John Keats? No doubt the poet lived long enough himself to have reckoned it as anything rather than one of "the blessing of Tighe" sent from "the fretwork of heaven" that this very flat sonnet was doomed to appear among his own works, and to reduce one of his editors to ignominious recantation.

The second part of the tale to be unfolded is more serious. It affects those delightful couplets, signed

XXX," which Leigh Hunt published under the title Vox et Præterea Nihil in The Indicator for the 19th of January 1820, and which, with much circumstance, were gathered into the Library Edition of Keats, with the suggestion that they should be regarded as a rejected passage of Endymion, originally intended for the Third Book, to come between lines 853 and 854. These couplets were the subject of a correspondence between Keats's editor and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who took the keenest interest in the formation of a full edition and sound text of Keats. The editor was led to attribute the lines to Keats solely by internal evidence. There was nothing else to do more than speculate about. Consulted on the subject, Rossetti wrote:

"I remember setting eyes in my earliest days on the passage you send me, and doubtless came to the conclusion that it must be by Keats, though it had for me no such charm as attached to the wondrous Belle Dame sans Merci, also published in The Indicator with signature Caviare... I can well understand Keats's rejecting this passage; since, though replete with a general luscious beauty, it is quite without such supreme value in imaginative treatment as (despite some Cockney syllabification) the passage which I suppose to have preceded it. Is there any language in which X is called anything like Keat? In such case the XXX might represent Keats."

As to the meaning of the mystical letters XXX, there was further correspondence; and Rossetti wrote thus in a later letter:

:

I should think that triple X almost certainly stands for Triplex in relation to Diana-Luna-Hecate. Keats's

text-book was of course Lemprière, and much bearing that way is to be found under those headings there. Keats speaks of the triple character of Diana at the end of the Sonnet to Homer."

This was certainly a plausible suggestion; nor was it to be forgotten that Endymion, when his heart was divided between Diana, as known to him, and the fair Indian, in whose form she disguised herself, exclaimed, "I have a triple soul"; or that the poet himself had three public names, John Keats, Caviare, and Lucy Vaughan Lloyd. Rossetti's explanation also ran parallel with a name which Keats's schoolfellow, Cowper, applied to Charles Cowden Clarke, namely, "Three Hundred," in allusion to his three initial C's. However, notwithstanding the plausibility of the suggestion, and difficult as it is to imagine any one but Keats writing the delicious couplet,

Like the low voice of Syrinx when she ran
Into the forests from Arcadian Pan:

so strongly resembling a couplet in Endymion as published by Keats :

Telling us how fair, trembling Syrinx fled
Arcadian Pan, with such a horrid dread-

notwithstanding internal evidence and probable speculation, it remains to be said that the whole passage must, after all, be yielded to a poet whom Keats did not much affect, namely, Bryan Waller Procter (" Barry Cornwall"). How completely and unjustly that excellent man's poetry is forgotten or ignored in the present day is evident from the fact that, although his beautiful verses have stood for thir