[Footnote 6: _John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics,
and After-fame_. By Sidney Colvin. Second edition. (Macmillan.)]

We believe that both the positive and the negative of that vindication
might be exemplified among chosen spirits to-day, living or untimely
dead; but we desire, not to enlist Sir Sidney in a cause, but only to
make apparent the reason why, in spite of minor dissents and inevitable
differences of estimation, our sympathy with him is enduring. It may be
that we have chosen to identify ourselves so closely with Keats that we
feel to Sir Sidney the attachment that is reserved for the staunch
friend of a friend who is dead; but we do not believe that this is so.
We are rather attached by the sense of a loyalty that exists in and for
itself; more intimate repercussions may follow, but they can follow only
when the critical honesty, the determination to let Keats be valid as
Keats, whatever it might cost (and we can see that it sometimes costs
Sir Sidney not a little), has impressed itself upon us.

It is rather by this than by Sir Sidney's particular contributions to
our knowledge of the poet that we judge his book. This assured, we
accept his patient exposition of the theme of 'Endymion' with a friendly
interest that would certainly not be given to one with a lesser claim
upon us; and in this spirit we can also find a welcome for the minute
investigation of the pictorial and plastic material of Keats's
imagination. Under auspices less benign we might have found the former
mistaken and the latter irrelevant; but it so happens that when Sir
Sidney shows us over the garden every goose is a swan. Like travellers
who at the end of a long day's journey among an inhospitable peasantry
are, against their expectation received in a kindly farm, and find
themselves talking glibly to their host of matters which are unimportant