REPLY TO SHELLEY

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 189, 7 May 1937, Page 16

REPLY TO SHELLEY

Famous Keats Letter in British Museum One of the most celebrated of Keats’s letters —that written to Shelley from Hampstead on August. 10, 1820—has just been deposited on indefinite loan in the British .Museum by Lord Abiuger. The property in the letter is entailed in the family of Lord Abinger, with which Shelley was connected. Shelley had invited Keats to Italy. In reply Keats says:— “There is no doubt that an English winter would put an end. to me and do so in a lingering, hateful manner; therefore I must either voyage, or journey to Italy, as a soldier marches up to a battery. My nerves at present are the worst part of me, yet they feel soothed when I think that, come what extreme may, I shall not be destined to remain in one spot long enough to take a hatred of any four particular bed posts.” The two poets had been corresponding regarding their writings, and Keats says:— “I am glad you take any pleasure in my poor Poem [presumably ‘Endymion’] —which I would willingly take the trouble to unwrite, if possible, did I care so much as I have done about Reputation.” He had received as a gift from Shelley a copy of “The Cenci,” and comments: — “There is only one part of it I am judge of: the poetry and dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the Mammon. A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the God—an artist must serve Mammon—he must have ‘selfconcentration,’ selfishness perhaps. “You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore. The thought of such discipline must fall like cold chains upon you, who perhaps never sat' with your wings furl'd for six months together.” Keats himself admits that this is “extraordinary talk for the writer of ‘Endymion,’ whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards.” Now he is “pick’d up and sorted to a pip. My imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk.” Among other recent additions to the British Museum is a fine English illuminated psalter of about 1360, presented by friends of the late Dr. M. It. James, Provost of Eton, in his memory. This is the more interesting in that it provides proof to a surmise of Dr. Janies himself that one of the Egertou MSB already in the museum is English and not German or French.