of Keats’s charm as a man is his fascinating incompleteness.  We do not want him reduced to a sand-paper smoothness or made perfect by the addition of popular virtues.  Still, if Mr. Colvin has not given us a very true picture of Keats’s character, he has certainly told the story of his life in a pleasant and readable manner.  He may not write with the ease and grace of a man of letters, but he is never pretentious and not often pedantic.

Mr. Rossetti’s book is a great failure.  To begin with, Mr. Rossetti commits the great mistake of separating the man from the artist.  The facts of Keats’s life are interesting only when they are shown in their relation to his creative activity.  The moment they are isolated they are either uninteresting or painful.  Mr. Rossetti complains that the early part of Keats’s life is uneventful and the latter part depressing, but the fault lies with the biographer, not with the subject.

The book opens with a detailed account of Keats’s life, in which he spares us nothing, from what he calls the ‘sexual misadventure at Oxford’ down to the six weeks’ dissipation after the appearance of the Blackwood article and the hysterical and morbid ravings of the dying man.  No doubt, most if not all of the things Mr. Rossetti tells us are facts; but there is neither tact shown in the selection that is made of the facts nor sympathy in the use to which they are put.  When Mr. Rossetti writes of the man he forgets the poet, and when he criticises the poet he shows that he does not understand the man.  His first error, as we have said, is isolating the life from the work; his second error is his treatment of the work itself.  Take, for instance, his criticism of that wonderful Ode to a Nightingale, with all its marvellous magic of music, colour and form.  He begins by saying that ‘the first point of weakness’ in the poem is the ‘surfeit of mythological allusions,’ a statement which is absolutely untrue, as out of the eight stanzas of the poem only three contain any mythological allusions at all, and of these not one is either forced or remote.  Then coming to the second verse,

   Oh for a draught of vintage, that hath been
      Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
   Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
      Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!

Mr. Rossetti exclaims in a fine fit of ‘Blue Ribbon’ enthusiasm:  ’Surely nobody wants wine as a preparation for enjoying a nightingale’s music, whether in a literal or in a fanciful relation’!  ’To call wine “the true, the blushful Hippocrene” . . . seems’ to him ’both stilted and repulsive’; ’the phrase “with beaded bubbles winking at the brim” is (though picturesque) trivial’; ’the succeeding image, “Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards"’ is ‘far worse’; while such an expression as ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’ is an obvious pleonasm, for Dryad really means Oak-nymph!  As for that superb burst of passion,