He was popular at school, as boys of spirit always are, and impressed his
companions with a sense of his power. They thought he would one day be a
famous soldier. This may have been owing to the stories he told them of
the heroic uncle, whose deeds, we may be sure, were properly famoused by
the boy Homer, and whom they probably took for an admiral at the least,
as it would have been well for Keats's literary prosperity if he had
been. At any rate, they thought John would be a great man, which is the
main thing, for the public opinion of the playground is truer and more
discerning than that of the world, and if you tell us what the boy was,
we will tell you what the man longs to be, however he may be repressed by
necessity or fear of the police reports.
Lord Houghton has failed to discover anything else especially worthy of
record in the school-life of Keats. He translated the twelve books of the
Aeneid, read Robinson Crusoe and the Incas of Peru, and looked into
Shakespeare. He left school in 1810, with little Latin and no Greek, but
he had studied Spence's Polymetis, Tooke's Pantheon, and Lempriere's
Dictionary, and knew gods, nymphs, and heroes, which were quite as good
company perhaps for him as artists and aspirates. It is pleasant to fancy
the horror of those respectable writers if their pages could suddenly
have become alive tinder their pens with all that the young poet saw in
them.
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