Walter Scott was a prominent contributor to the Review which through its
false and malicious criticisms had always been considered to have caused
the death of Keats_.

My surprise was as great as his at my having lived all those seventeen
years in Rome and been so removed from the great world, that this, a
fact so interesting to me to know, had never reached me. I had been
unconsciously the painful means of disturbing poor old Sir Walter with
a subject so sore and unwelcome that I could only conclude it must have
been the immediate cause of his sudden illness. Nothing could be farther
from my nature than to have been guilty of such seemingly wanton
inhumanity; but I had no opportunity afterwards of explaining the truth,
or of justifying my conduct in any way.

This was the last striking incident connected with Keats's fame which
fell within my own experience, and perhaps may have been the last, or
one of the last, symptoms of that party-spirit which in the artificial
times of George IV. was so common even among poets in their treatment of
one another,--they assuming to be mere politicians, and striving to be
oblivious of their heart-ennobling pursuit.

It only remains for me to speak of my return to Rome in 1861, after an
absence of twenty years, and of the favorable change and the enlargement
during that time of Keats's fame,--not as manifested by new editions of
his works, or by the contests of publishers about him, or by the way in
which most new works are illustrated with quotations from him, or by the
fact that some favorite lines of his have passed into proverbs, but by
the touching evidence of his _silent grave_. That grave, which I can
remember as once the object of ridicule, has now become the poetic
shrine of the world's pilgrims who care and strive to live in the happy