An article in
_Blackwood_, breathing the spirit of British caste, had the bad taste to
tell the young apothecary to go back to his galley-pots. The excessive
sensibility of Keats received a great shock from this treatment; but we
cannot help thinking that too much stress has been laid upon this in
saying that he was killed by it. This was more romantic than true. He was
by inheritance consumptive, and had lost a brother by that disease. Add to
this that his peculiar passions and longings took the form of fierce
hypochondria.
With a decided originality, he was so impressible that there are in his
writings traces of the authors whom he was reading, if he did not mean to
make them models of style.
In 1820 he published a volume containing _Lamia_, _Isabella_, and _The Eve
of St. Agnes_, and _Hyperion_, a fragment, which was received with far
greater favor by the reviewers. Keats was self-reliant, and seems to have
had something of that magnificent egotism which is not infrequently
displayed by great minds.
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