commenced with me in such an ugly attack on dear Keats, whose fame,
when I went to England in 1838, was not only well established, but was
increasing from day to day, and Mr. Rogers was often at the pains to
tell me so, and to relate the many histories of poets who had been less
fortunate than Keats.

It was in the year of the Reform Bill, 1830, that I first heard of the
Paris edition (Galignani's) of Keats's works, and I confess that I was
quite taken by surprise, nor could I really believe the report until I
saw the book with the engraved portrait from my own drawing; for, after
all the vicissitudes of Keats's fame which I had witnessed, I could not
easily understand his becoming the poet of "the million." I had now the
continued gratification in Rome of receiving frequent visits from the
admirers of Keats and Shelley, who sought every way of showing kindness
to me. One great cause of this change, no doubt, was the rise of all
kinds of mysticism in religious opinions, which often associated
themselves with Shelley's poetry, and I then for the first time heard
him named as the only really religious poet of the age. To the growing
fame of Keats I can attribute some of the pleasantest and most valuable
associations of my after-life, as it included almost the whole society
of gifted young men at that time called "Young England." Here I may
allude to the extraordinary change I now observed in the manners and
morals of Englishmen generally: the foppish love of dress was in a great
measure abandoned, and all intellectual pursuits were caught up with
avidity, and even made fashionable.

The most remarkable example of the strange capriciousness of Keats's
fame which fell under my personal observation occurred in my later Roman
years, during the painful visit of Sir Walter Scott to Rome in the
winding-up days of his eventful life, when he was broken down not only