[In the following excerpt, Jones presents an overview of Reynolds's literary career.]

JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS AND THE KEATS CIRCLE

John Hamilton Reynolds's father's family background entitled him to his place as a member of the Cockney school of English poetry. His great-grandfather, Thomas Reynolds, was a tanner of Tottenham, and his grandfather, Noble Reynolds, a barber of the same parish.¹ His father, George, after attending Christ's Hospital from 1774 to 1779, taught school for most of his long life in London at the Lambeth Boys Parochial School, the Lambeth Female Asylum, and at Christ's Hospital, though from the early 1790s until about 1806 he left the city to teach at Shrewsbury School. Active in his profession, he was a specialist in the Bell system of education, who was once sent by Christ's Hospital to introduce the plan at Hertford School, and he published six school books,² one of which the Edinburgh Review listed in the same announcement of new books as Keats's Endymion.³ In his family life, however, he was quiet and unassertive; Keats does not mention him even once during all the time he visited in his houses. His son delicately refrained from informing him when he interceded to try to prevent a reduction of his salary in 1820.⁴ His “rooted objection to having his personal appearance delineated in any way” frustrated all Thomas Hood's attempts to have him sit for a portrait.⁵

Clearly the stronger spouse throughout their long life together was Charlotte Cox Reynolds, whom he married on 7 January 1790.⁶ Four years older than her husband when she married at what was then the rather late age of twenty nine, she came from a family with pretensions superior to those of his humble origin. She was related by marriage to a distinguished Hamilton family whose descendents included the famous William Beckford and the sprightly writer on hunting, Peter Beckford, and she showed her pride in her connections in the middle names of two of her children, John Hamilton and Eliza Beckford Reynolds. Her only brother, William Beckford Cox, who established himself financially during military service in India and the East Indies, was the father of the sophisticated “Charmian” of Keats's letters.⁷ While her husband remains almost unobserved in the wings, Mrs. Reynolds's more forceful personality figures prominently on stage in the records of Keats and Hood. And yet one ought to guard against exaggeration of her strong will which might result from Keats's reaction against her or from Hood's bitter quarrel with her in 1835. John F. M. Dovaston's “Lines to Mrs. Reynolds of Lambeth with a Goose” testifies to the happy home which she maintained for her husband as well as her children.⁸ The character of Mrs. Morton in Reynolds's Edward Herbert essays, with her subordination of herself to her beloved husband despite her superior intellect, hints that Charlotte Reynolds was wise enough to treat her husband's ego carefully.⁹ And Hood's early letters reveal that she was as loving and lovable as she was firm in the control of her household.

The single known record of George Reynolds in the years immediately following his graduation from Christ's Hospital in 1779 shows only that on 5 February 1788 he lived at Kingsland in the area of Hackney and Tottenham;¹⁰ probably by that time he had already begun his long career of teaching in London schools which have not been identified. He was still in London on 28 November 1791, because the baptism of his first child, Jane, is recorded on that date.¹¹ Thereafter he moved the family to Shrewsbury, where he taught in the school and where his first and only son, John Hamilton Reynolds, was born on 9 September 1794. Three other daughters were later born at Shrewsbury: Mariane¹² on 23 February 1797, Eliza Beckford in 1799, and Charlotte in 1802.

From his ninth through his twelfth years (1803-1806), John Hamilton Reynolds attended the Shrewsbury School, where his father taught. Two poems in the London Magazine, signed with Reynolds's pseudonym Ned Ward, Jr., cast some light on what life was like there for the young students.¹³ In May 1823 Reynolds wrote “A Parthian Peep at Life, an Epistle to R———d A———n,”¹⁴ recalling joyously their shared schoolboy activities, but by the next year the friend had died and in “Stanzas to the Memory of Richard Allen,”¹⁵ he lamented the schoolmate who had been buried in a “country church-yard” under trees beneath which he had played as a boy. Although no Shrewsbury School record has been accessible to check on Richard Allen's attendance, it seems safe to conclude that in general Reynolds drew on his own experience at school, though nostalgia and poetic license may have colored some details. The activities recounted are by no means surprising—indeed, they are what one would expect of the usual schoolboys—but they are particular enough to deserve being specified. In “A Parthian Peep,” he recalls playing on the walls, shooting marbles on the playground under the trees, reading romances in the shade, playing at the river's edge (the Severn), looking for birds' nests, stealing crab apples, and attending a school party with country dancing. Repeating some of the items like the marbles and searching for linnets in “Stanzas to the Memory of Richard Allen,” he adds recollections of “wild Thursday afternoon” (evidently a half holiday), hunting, fishing, swimming, playing ball and prisoner's base, rolling hoops, climbing trees, and stealing apricots for a “pillow treat.”

The poem “Old Ballads” included in a London essay¹⁶ probably refers to Shrewsbury School too, though the experience may have occurred during his later attendance at St. Paul's. After reading the ballads “under the play-ground tree,” he would tell the stories to the other boys, undoubtedly interesting them the more because he was breaking the rule as he related the tales of Chevy Chase and Richard Plantagenet. The picture which emerges from the poems is one of a normal and happy school life.

The fullest account of life at Shrewsbury School at this time appears in The Fancy (1820), but one must be warier in dealing with the experiences of Peter Corcoran described there than was John Masefield, who accepted them all as Reynolds's own.¹⁷ Although Peter Corcoran echoes Reynolds's life in many ways—both were born in September 1794, both were sent to Shrewsbury School, both had an avid interest in sports, and both were aspiring poets—the book is mock autobiography. Its theme, treated both comically and sentimentally, is the moral decay of Peter Corcoran, ending in rejection by his beloved and his death because of his increasing addiction to sports, especially the unsavory boxing. Anticipation of that theme undoubtedly led Reynolds to exaggerate some of his own misconduct and to add offenses of which he was innocent: young Peter tore grammars, broke bounds, pilfered orchards, fought, and swore. As the traditional servant to an older boy, he cleaned shoes, set the tea utensils, and prepared special treats for his supper. Also for his boy-master, he would slip out of the bedroom window at night to steal fruit for his tart, and he would carry the older boy's fighting cocks in a bag to a nearby field. Like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, he was very active at night, stealing out by moonlight to fish for trout and swim in the Severn. Because he did not study industriously, the headmaster punished him frequently with the rod, but his tutor, the Reverend Mr. S———, who was third master, was both kind and assiduous in counseling him and caring for him.¹⁸ Although we cannot know which experiences were Reynolds's own, a summary of these activities in a biographical sketch is valuable because, after discounting the degree of misconduct, we are left with a sense of what life was like at Shrewsbury School when Reynolds attended.

Three other features of Peter's development at Shrewsbury are especially important because the appearance of the same traits in the later Reynolds argue that they were indeed based on personal schoolboy experience: the writing of verse, the desire for fame, and the sharp wit. Peter began writing verse at this early period: he lampooned his boyish enemies and he penned melancholy and heroic songs. Deeply gratified by the applause these efforts won from his schoolfellows, he was stirred early by a craving for fame. In like manner, his fighting with schoolmates was for glory, as well as for love of battle. His wit also began to win notice; no one could surpass him in smart remarks to the master's daughter or the maid.

It is certain that by 1809 the Reynolds family had returned from Shrewsbury to London because the Christ's Hospital record for that year includes a payment to George Reynolds of “£20 for visiting the Hertford school and introducing there Dr. Bell's system of education.”¹⁹ But probably the family had made the move earlier, in 1806 when John Hamilton finished at Shrewsbury School and enrolled at St. Paul's, where he remained until 1810. Later in life Richard Harris Barham, author of The Ingoldsby Legends, reported that Reynolds had been “an old schoolfellow of mine at St. Paul's School,”²⁰ but Barham probably did not know Reynolds at the school well, if at all, since he was six years Reynolds's senior and he left the school the year after Reynolds's arrival to enter Oxford in 1807. Richard Bentley, the same age as Reynolds, was evidently more nearly contemporary at St. Paul's, but the strictly businesslike tone of Reynolds's later letters to him in this volume argues that at most their acquaintance in school could have been slight.

Graduating from St. Paul's in 1810, Reynolds secured a junior clerkship in the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance office not later than 18 July, the date on which he signed his first document. He continued to perform this clerical work until about 24 April 1816, the date of his last signature in the record.²¹ The office was small as compared with Lamb's great East India House with its numerous clerks and huge tomes of accounts; the Amicable Society usually employed only three clerks at a time, among whom were John Griffin in 1810 and W. B. Wedlake in 1816. Reynolds evidently performed this mundane work capably from his sixteenth through his twenty-second year, if the fact that he signed most of the documents from 1810 through 1816 can be taken as evidence of his competence.

During some of his free time, Reynolds kept in touch with an old friend in Shropshire, John F. M. Dovaston, who had been his father's student in Shrewsbury School.²² Dovaston was a lawyer who showed his affection for his London friends by including in Fitz-Gwarine, with Other Rhymes a sonnet to John and “Lines to Mrs. Reynolds of Lambeth with a Goose.” Reynolds returned the affection with an “Ode to Friendship, Inscribed to J. F. M. Dovaston of West Felton” in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1812, his first known poem, and later in 1814 dedicated his much more ambitious The Eden of Imagination to him.

As early as 1798 one John Dovaston of West Felton (presumably the father of J. F. M. Dovaston) had founded the Breidden Society near Shrewsbury for the purpose of celebrating an annual festival on Breidden Hill with eating, drinking, smoking, poetry reading, toasting, singing, dancing, and—if the record is to be believed—much kissing sparked by the traditional kissing of a stone.²³ Until his death in 1808, John Dovaston conducted the summer festival every year without any formal organization. In 1809 Thomas Yates, who succeeded as president, arranged for written rules, which were recorded by J. F. M. Dovaston. Every year thereafter the president named his successor for the following year before leaving the hill, and “the president's will being by him signified” was “in all cases [to] be held decisive law.” But the president had to pay for those prerogatives since he alone was “at the whole Expence, and Trouble of providing a plain cold dinner; Rum, Brandy, and Beer.” No laurel being available in the area, a poet laureate could not be created; instead, the abundant fern on the hill led to the substitution of the august position of poet ferneat, a post which vied in importance with that of queen of the hill, which the president filled by solemn pronouncement each year after selecting from the fair revellers. J. F. M. Dovaston was president, poet ferneat, and recorder in 1810; vice-president and poet ferneat in 1811; and poet ferneat in 1812.

Although there is no certain evidence, it seems highly probable that Reynolds attended these festivities with his friend Dovaston while he lived in Shrewsbury, until 1806, while the affairs were being conducted by the elder Dovaston, and he may well have come over from London for such happy occasions in later years. In 1813 Reynolds himself served as poet ferneat, as the following extract from the minutes reveals:

July 12, 1813

The day was fine and the company numerous. At one o'clock upwards of sixty sat down to dinner, soon after which the usual convivialities began. The annual tribute of the Poet Ferneat M^r John Hamilton Reynolds of Lambeth was received with heartfelt applause, and he being absent his cup was crowned with the Ferne.

The poem which Reynolds sent shows that he was familiar with the customs of the occasion:

THE REFLECTIONS OF MIRTH, ON THE EVE OF THE BREIDDEN FESTIVAL, FOR THE YEAR 1813.

To Morrow's dawn shall scarcely light
The ferny brow of Breidden's height,
          Ere souls of wit and worth
Will rise to sip at Pleasure's rill,
And to make that “heaven kissing hill”
          A kissing hill of earth.
That morn shall find each roseate streak
Reflected bright in many a cheek,
          It's light in many an eye:
The gladsome smiles of day shall grace
The festive scene, and many a face
          Will shine as brilliantly.
Wit and song the scene shall crown,
I the corpse of Care will drown,
          And give the wine a zest.
The sun shall view the gen'rous feast
When first he rises in the east,
          And when he leaves the west.
Time shall throw aside his scythe then;
Time shall bless the feast of Breidden,
          While gay the gambols pass;
Time shall lose his grating pow'r,
Shall disregard the sandy hour,
          And only use the glass.
Then quickly fly, ye shades of night,
And quickly come, O morning bright,
          In all thy colours fair;
Every lov'd one, every friend,
Around my favour'd circle blend,
          While I support the chair.

John H. Reynolds

Occupying the chair which his poem, read in absentia, supported was Henry Langley, president of the society for that year. The punning evident in the poem, which Reynolds loved all his life, culminated in 1825 in Odes and Addresses to Great People, written jointly with Hood. Perhaps it is not too obvious to explain that the “favour'd circle” of the next to the last line refers not only to his many friends in the society gathered for the occasion, but to his wine glass, which he knew would be ceremonially crowned with fern. The reference anticipates happily the many years of convivial imbibing which he would enjoy, but also unhappily the very heavy drinking of his last half-dozen years.

Like Lamb, whom he knew well, Reynolds continued with his clerical duties and produced literary work in his spare time. After following Dovaston's lead by submitting several pieces to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1812 and 1813, he expanded to more ambitious efforts in 1814. Through the publishing firm of his friend John Martin, he issued Safie, an Eastern Tale in an attempt to capitalize on the vogue of Byronic Oriental tales in verse. Byron was favorably impressed with the book, as can be seen from the entry in his journal, his letter to Reynolds, and his letter to Francis Hodgson recommending a favorable review. Not only did he make these efforts to encourage the author and foster the book; he also met personally with Reynolds over “a vegetable dinner.”²⁴ Later in the same year Reynolds published, again through Martin, The Eden of Imagination, an elaborate imitation of Wordsworth, chiefly in the manner of An Evening Walk. Martin's short-lived periodical the Inquirer also furnished him with an outlet for several poems and prose pieces.

His satisfaction with these promising early achievements was clouded darkly late in 1814 by the death of an unidentified girl whom he loved, a tragedy over which he grieved repeatedly in numerous poems dating from January 1815. But in late 1815 he had recovered sufficiently to take several steps up the journalistic-literary ladder by joining the staff of John Scott's influential Champion, an association which he continued through December 1817. He increased the volume of his production markedly during these years with a steady flow of literary essays, theatrical reviews, and verse, including, aside from his abundant contributions to the Champion, “An Ode” (1815) on the overthrow of Napoleon published by Martin.

Perhaps it was through his publisher, John Martin, that Reynolds met Benjamin Bailey and James Rice, Jr., since Martin's sister married Bailey's brother.²⁵ Rice, two years older than Reynolds, was a junior attorney in his father's London office; Bailey, three years older than Reynolds, was a serious young man with strong moral and religious inclinations and a “loquacious pen” (as he described it) who resided in London where he had come from his native Cambridgeshire. Rice, whose bad health remained chronic, traveled often to Sidmouth in Devon for relief. In the summer of 1814, he took with him his new friend Bailey, and there the two first met Mary, Sarah, and Thomasine Leigh.²⁶ A warm friendship developed quickly with the sisters and their cousin Maria Pearse, who spent much time at their home, Slade Hall. Visiting them at Slade about a dozen times from 1814 to 1817, and meeting them at least once at Clifton near Bristol, Rice and Bailey established close bonds with all these “adopted sisters,” to whom they supplied abundant verse and glowing prose celebrations of friendship. Bailey fell in love with the youngest, Thomasine, and waxed most sentimental about his adored “Zilia,” but she never returned his love, and he came to realize that she was not just displaying maidenly modesty. In 1817 she settled the matter finally by marrying Lieutenant John Carslake of the Royal Navy.

Two of their friendly projects may give some of the flavor of their intimate association. In the spring of 1815, they planted six sweetbriars in the garden at Slade to commemorate their reunion and to represent their growing friendship. In March of the same year, after reading and copying into commonplace books Wordsworth's “Poems on the Naming of Places,” they made a walking tour of the coast, naming six rocks of the Dunscombe Cliffs for each of the group and adding a seventh “Union Rock” to symbolize their closeness.

By 25 March 1815 Eliza Powell Drewe from Exeter had joined the group. Bailey was considerate in easing her into this “very dear circle of friends” when she at first imagined that he “thought lightly of her” as an outsider.²⁷ Despite a certain ponderousness and stiffness of manner, Bailey emerges from the voluminous records as a rather attractive person. Though usually more sentimental or moral than gay, he was capable of high-spirited congeniality. Rice emerges as a man who refused to permit recurring illness to repress his warm affection, his lively wit, and his playful teasing and joking.

Thanks to Clayton E. Hudnall's admirable study of the Leigh Browne-Lockyer Collection, an old error has been corrected, and we now know that Reynolds did not join Bailey and Rice in their visits to Slade during the first two years. The first date by which we can be certain that Reynolds had met Bailey was 18 February 1815, when Bailey wrote a poem on his introduction to Reynolds's sisters,²⁸ but the two young men may have known each other for some time before Reynolds introduced his friend to the family. The first recorded date by which Reynolds knew Rice was 17 June 1815, the date in a book presented by Reynolds to Rice, who in turn presented it to Thomasine Leigh.²⁹ It seems virtually certain, however, that Rice, who was so close to Bailey, would have met Reynolds soon after Bailey did, if indeed it was not Rice who preceded Bailey as Reynolds's friend.

Bailey and Rice sang the praises of this young published poet whose two 1814 volumes had been reviewed rather widely and favorably, and the Leigh girls were so impressed that they welcomed any of his verses which they could secure for their commonplace books. In October and November 1815 Rice and Bailey wrote two letters from London which describe vividly the kind of life that they and Reynolds were living at the time. The three frequently spent their evenings together after Rice had finished his legal duties and Reynolds his clerical work. First Rice on 9 October 1815:

… when the Evening closes in & we “stir the fire & wheel the sofa round and draw the curtains close” when “we retire the world shut out.”³⁰ Then it is that We Bailey Reynolds & myself in all the luxury of mental relaxation indulge our fancies our feelings & our humors, & without any of the prescriptions of form, ramble over the fields of imagination running after every butterfly subject that starts up before us.—You will of course suppose that he [Reynolds] is no stranger to our delightful & dear Sisterhood of Slade—but do not therefore for a moment think that we profane your names to those to whom you ought to be Strangers or in whose actual acquaintance we are not confident you would be pleased.—We have always some project on the carpet, some game ever afoot—Either Reynolds or Bailey have ever got the Muses Spur in their side that will not allow them rest or respite—& very sad things their productions may be for ought I know—but they give up pleasure & make us every now & then cry “excellent” & that serves our turn you Know as well as if they were better. Reynolds has made progress in a Tragedy that according to my own judgment (if it be not particularized) bids fair to stamp his name with very current reputation.—Within this week too we have bethought of us turning that delightful little tale of Louisa Venoni³¹ into an Opera for which it has ever seemed to me admirably suited—I have bargained to furnish the plot & some of the humour & Reynolds the serious & sentimental—or as a Satirist would quiz it, he is to be the Quack & I the merry Andrew of the Piece—no matter if these Our Plans never come to anything or change once a month like the Moon, like her too they serve to enliven our Nights whilst they do last.—³²

Then on 24 November 1815 Bailey described their joint composition of a poem to celebrate Sarah Leigh's birthday:

I told you in my letter of yesterday that we kept or were to keep your birthday at my rooms. … On the other side is our playfulness of affection [the poem]. Reynolds late in the Evening regretted that we had not sooner thought of writing a Poem on the occasion in triplets Each person writing a line. … I therefore immediately produced the paper, and wrote the first line. … They were all written in whirlwinds of laughing. For it was our delight so to change the thought of the person who wrote last as to puzzle him to convert it into anything like agreement or sense with his own, and then to laugh and make what noise we could to interrupt the unhappy artist who was doomed to scratch his head for a thought. … I wish you could see Reynolds whose lines are so superior in this little thing to ours—³³

Toward the middle of 1816, when The Naiad neared publication, Reynolds felt secure enough to abandon his clerical work at the Amicable Assurance Society. After Taylor and Hessey issued the poem in August, he left with Rice for a long vacation in Exeter and Sidmouth. During the visit at Slade Hall from 31 August through 11 September, he met the Leighs in the company of Eliza Powell Drewe of Exeter, whom he later married. His letters to Benjamin Robert Haydon reveal that he did not, as has long been supposed, meet Eliza through the Leighs. When he wrote Haydon on 26 August, five days before the visit to Slade, he already knew the Drewes. He was evidently visiting in their house in Exeter; he certainly knew them well enough to ask Haydon to send his letters to their address.³⁴ He had probably met Eliza and her family through the Drewes' London relative, Mrs. Butler, a friend of the Reynolds family in Lambeth.³⁵

Proud of The Naiad: A Tale with Other Poems, which combined imitation of Scott and Wordsworthian overtones in the title poem, with Wordsworthian influence even more apparent in the short pieces, he sent the revered Wordsworth himself a copy for judgment. With candor and directness, veiled only thinly by concern for the young poet's feelings, Wordsworth replied with considerable censure and only limited praise. Reynolds must have been disappointed.

His disappointment over Wordsworth's letter was more than compensated for by the greatest good fortune from another direction, as he welcomed Keats into the circle which included Haydon and Leigh Hunt. By the time of his return from the vacation in Devonshire, his friendship with Haydon was well established. Although he admired the painter's achievements and expressed his admiration enthusiastically, he was not overawed by the older man's towering ambition and immense confidence in his own ability, as the mock attack and joking tone of much of the two letters he wrote from Exeter reveal. In October 1816 he spent a great deal of time with Hunt and with Haydon, whose temporary quarters at 7 Pond Street, Hampstead, allowed him to visit constantly with Hunt. After Charles Cowden Clarke introduced Keats to Hunt in the week of 13 October³⁶ and Keats presented Hunt with the sheaf of selected poems as a sample, Reynolds was one of those friendly critics among whom the poems circulated for judgment, as can be seen from Haydon's verses to Reynolds.³⁷ Aware of his own ability, and ambitious as he was for The Naiad, a copy of which he had already sent Hunt, he saw immediately that Keats's poetic potential was clearly superior to his own, and he told Haydon so forthrightly. He could not be envious of one whom he sensed at the outset as the greatest poet of his generation. Furthermore, he was immediately attracted by the extraordinary personality of Keats the man: he dined with Keats at Haydon's in Hampstead on 20 October 1816 and with Keats at Hunt's on another evening in October.³⁸ From that beginning developed the friendship which was to be Keats's closest outside his family for the next remarkable three years.

Soon Reynolds introduced Keats to his family, who by 22 November 1816 had moved from Lambeth to 19 Lamb's Conduit Street, where Keats visited them often. George Reynolds continued his service of more than seven years for Christ's Hospital, a position which he combined with that of writing master to the Female Asylum in Lambeth. After he was appointed head writing master in 1817,³⁹ he moved in early 1818 to one of the master's houses near Christ's Hospital in Little Britain.⁴⁰ Like Haydon before him, Keats was quickly welcomed by Reynolds's sisters; on 9 March 1817 he wrote of the “kind sisters.” He was understandably more attracted to the older girls, Jane, twenty-six, and Mariane, twenty, than he was to the younger sisters. For almost two years he was thoroughly sympathetic, writing them gay and affectionate letters, while they reciprocated by entertaining him in their home and preserving drafts of his poems in their commonplace books. In October 1818 a reaction against their sentiment which had been accumulating climaxed in his disapproval of their jealous treatment of Mrs. Reynolds's niece, Jane Cox, and during his last months in England he was infuriated with both mother and daughters because of their disapproval of Fanny Brawne. But none of this later dislike of mother and sisters seriously affected his close friendship with the son and brother.

Through Reynolds, either directly or indirectly, Keats met most of the other friends who are now such familiar members of the Keats circle. By 17 March 1817 he knew Charles and Maria Dilke, and through the Dilkes he met Charles Brown. By about 12 April 1817 a transfer had been arranged from Keats's unsatisfactory first publisher to John Taylor and James A. Hessey, Reynolds's friends who had published The Naiad; significantly, Keats wrote his first letter to Taylor and Hessey from the Reynolds house. Before he left for the Isle of Wight on 14 April 1817, he had met Rice, and about the same time he met Bailey, when the sudden death of a friend brought him to London from Oxford, where he had matriculated on 19 October 1816 to read for holy orders. Keats called John Martin friend by August 1817 and saw him frequently thereafter. Through either Reynolds or Taylor and Hessey, he met Richard Woodhouse, to whom our debt is very great for preserving so much Keatsian material.

Reynolds's services to Keats are so familiar as to require only summary here. He stimulated Keats's writing of Isabella, Robin Hood, the espistle To J. H. Reynolds, Esq., and numerous short pieces. His discussions and correspondence evoked some of Keats's finest letters on poetry. He championed Keats's reputation vigorously, reviewing Poems of 1817 and Endymion favorably, encouraging sympathetic reviews from others, and preventing him from publishing the first brash preface to Endymion. Throughout the friendship Reynolds was clear-sighted and unselfish. Though Hunt had praised Reynolds equally with Keats and Shelley in the “Young Poets” article in the Examiner of 1 December 1816, Reynolds never confused his own great talent with his friend's genius. He wrote Keats prophetically, “Do you get Fame,—and I shall have it in being your affectionate and steady friend.”⁴¹ The same modest disavowal of hope for fame appeared also in “The Pilgrimage of Living Poets,” in “Farewell to the Muses,” and in two fine sonnets in The Fancy.

Despite Reynolds's diffidence, the association with Keats stimulated his own work, as he continued to produce a large volume of material for the periodicals, and at the same time wrote the poems which went into The Garden of Florence and Other Poems (1821). Probably because he had resolved on marriage to Eliza Powell Drewe in 1817 (Keats does not speak of an engagement until 13 July 1818, but he treats it as a matter long settled⁴²), he turned to a steady source of income to replace the salary from the clerical work which he had resigned the preceding year. Rice encouraged him to enter law, generously paying for him the fee of £110, and promising to take him in as a partner if he ever succeeded to his father's business—a promise which he fulfilled faithfully.⁴³ On 4 November 1817 Reynolds became an articled pupil in the office of Francis Fladgate, a relative of Rice, and thereafter divided his efforts between literature and the law in such a fashion that both his interests eventually suffered. He vacillated between objection to the dreariness of the law and interest in it: five months after his entry Keats is obviously replying to his complaints about the law when he reassures him that all knowledge, including even dull civil law, has value,⁴⁴ but after another year Keats reports, “Reynolds is completely limed in the law: he is not only reconcil'd to it but hobbyhorses upon it.”⁴⁵

During the three years after his entry into law, Reynolds's resolution to concentrate on it was partially thwarted by recurring illness and partially broken by heavy contributions to periodicals and by other writing. He wrote for the Yellow Dwarf, the Alfred, Constable's Edinburgh Magazine, and the Edinburgh Review. His reputation rose to such a height that William Blackwood went to surprising lengths to seduce him away from his liberal friends. On a visit to London Blackwood sought him out: Keats reports that “Blackwood wanted very much to see him—the scotch cannot manage by themselves at all—they want imagination.”⁴⁶ John Gibson Lockhart flattered him by praising him above Hazlitt: “The only enlivening things in it [Constable's Edinburgh Magazine] are a few articles now and then by Hazlitt, and a few better still by a gay writer of the name of Reynolds. … Mr. Reynolds, however, is certainly a very promising writer, and might surely do better things than copying the Cockneys.”⁴⁷ Blackwood's ally in the enemy camp, Peter George Patmore, brought to its climax this campaign to make Reynolds abandon his friends and turn his coat; on 7 April 1819 he wrote Blackwood:

I dined with Reynolds a few days ago—and talked with him about writing for you—but, as I expected, from his friendship with Hunt and Hazlitt, he has a feeling about the Magazine which prevents him—otherwise I know he would like to do so—for I was pleased to find that he didn't scruple to speak very highly of the general talent with which the work is conducted. He was very much pleased with the liberal offer you made him—to choose his subject and name his own terms.⁴⁸

In the light of Reynolds's financial need and the startling offer to name his own price, it is very much to his credit that he resisted all advances and remained just as determined as Keats not to “Mortgage [his] Brain to Blackwood.”⁴⁹

In addition to contributions to periodicals, Reynolds also produced during his association with Keats the splendid parody of Wordsworth's Peter Bell on 15 April 1819; a farce entitled One, Two, Three, Four, Five: By Advertisement on 17 July 1819, which Robert Gittings has recently suggested may be worthy of revival; the pseudo-autobiographical memoirs of Peter Corcoran called The Fancy in 1820; and The Garden of Florence and Other Poems in 1821. Gittings has observed of the last volume what is certainly true, though unremarked before—its similarity in general pattern to the Lamia volume. Both include imitations of Boccaccio, which had of course originally been planned for a joint volume. Just as Hyperion is a fragmentary major achievement, so “The Romance of Youth” is a fragmentary major effort. Reynolds's sonnets and lyrics correspond with Keats's, though Reynolds's volume has nothing approaching the massive great odes.⁵⁰ While this is not the place for extensive criticism of Reynolds's poetry, I would recommend a poem which other critics have passed over. It is not so much the title poem that is successful, nor the earnest “Romance of Youth,” interesting as it is, but “The Ladye of Provence,” which inclines toward the Chaucerian in its curious treatment of the sentimental and macabre (the heroine is tricked by her husband into eating the heart of her would-be lover). Though not so fascinating as Isabella, which it surpasses in weaknesses, it is a strange and partially successful poem with just a hint of irony that leaves a teasing question as to precisely what the poet's attitude was toward his material.

While Keats lived, Reynolds reacted against three members of the Keats circle with whom he had initially been very friendly: Haydon, Bailey, and Hunt. These relationships require some consideration.

The two letters from Reynolds to Haydon in this volume complement Haydon's doggerel invitation to Reynolds to dine with Keats⁵¹ to show clearly that by the autumn of 1816 the friendship was strong and unreserved on both sides. Like Keats, Haydon was received into the Reynolds home, as we know from his sending his best wishes to Reynolds's sisters. Reynolds's friendship with Haydon continued unabated as Keats's grew even to surpass it in 1817. But after 28 December 1817 Haydon exploded when Reynolds neither attended the immortal dinner nor gave any explanation as to why he did not attend. Reynolds could not brook that explosion because of Haydon's long history of being highhanded about appointments and other obligations. Although Reynolds's letters to Bailey have not been preserved, it seems a certain inference that Reynolds was in no mood to treat Haydon gently because Haydon had just behaved irresponsibly toward his older and closer friend, Bailey, who was courting his sister Mariane. Haydon had at first made magnanimous promises to accept an impecunious young painter named Cripps as a student without charge, then suddenly turned cool after Bailey and Keats responded to the proposal, and finally insulted Bailey with a “cutting” letter.⁵² Though the Cripps affair had been smoothed out, the memory of it must have rankled. When it came to cutting, Reynolds could always give better than he or his received; he was second only to his idol, Hazlitt, in that department. He replied to Haydon with “one of the most cutting” letters Keats had ever seen, blasting all his faults and weaknesses.⁵³ Though Keats thought Reynolds should have been more tolerant, he conceded that Reynolds was “on the right side of the question.” Of course the friendship ended, and the two were never reconciled. With the passage of time, however, Reynolds's anger cooled so that by the time he reviewed The Conversations of James Northcote twelve years later he was impartial enough to defend Haydon in part from Hazlitt's printed attack.⁵⁴

The letters from Rice and Bailey to the Leigh sisters quoted above have revealed the high degree of intimacy between Reynolds and Bailey in the early period. After Bailey began his study for the clergy, the close friendship continued undiminished. Keats's extremely high praise of Bailey is matched by Reynolds's praise of him in the Yellow Dwarf.⁵⁵ Whenever Bailey could get to London from Oxford, he spent much time in the hospitable Reynolds home and became a paragon of all the virtues for the Reynolds women. No subject could be mentioned without mother or daughters dragging in Bailey's name: “If you mentioned the word Tea pot—some one of them came out with an a propos about Bailey—noble fellow—fine fellow!”⁵⁶

Without the sex appeal of Reynolds, Rice, or Keats, Bailey was passionate by nature, “the slave of passion” to use his own phrase,⁵⁷ but less likely to be able to satisfy his desires irregularly, and, even if opportunities offered, he could not as a prospective clergyman easily permit himself such misconduct. Older than his friends by several years, he realized, it seems clear, that he needed a wife. He had tried Thomasine Leigh and failed. He turned to an eligible relative of John Martin's and was again rebuffed. Nothing daunted, he selected Mariane from the Reynolds sisters and paid his addresses to her. His peculiar combination of piety and passion is revealed by Keats's account of his wooing her “with the Bible and Jeremy Taylor under his arm.”⁵⁸ After sustained courtship, he made his declaration, but Mariane demurred, either genuinely not in love with him as Keats thought when he reported that she loved him like a brother, or with pre-Victorian delicacy lest she be supposed to leap at a proposal. Bailey failed to play the expected part of patient and determined suitor who perseveres until he wins the heart of the modest maiden. One can hardly blame him much when he recalls that Bailey had been through all that before, pining away for three years until Thomasine Leigh married another. He was not to be frustrated again. He turned swiftly to the sister of a college classmate, found in Hamilton Gleig a woman not disposed to play at cat and mouse, and married her, after making only a stiff bow to rectitude by returning Mariane's letters and requesting the return of his own.⁵⁹

For an ordinary man, all circumstances considered, Bailey's conduct seems perfectly understandable. But the trouble was that the Keats circle had not looked upon Bailey as an ordinary man—they, Keats included, had regarded him as godlike, and now he was revealed to be merely human. Keats was appalled. After thorough examination of the evidence, Rice decided that he would break with Bailey entirely. Reynolds must have been equally indignant over the supposed callousness to his sister. The sequel to the story, however, shows that neither Keats nor Reynolds was adamant. After time had calmed tempers, Keats wrote to congratulate him on his marriage, and when Bailey came down to London in 1820, Reynolds met him and talked with him.⁶⁰ It speaks well for Reynolds's character, as well as for Keats's, that he did not harbor an unrelenting grudge. Mariane did not suffer any serious damage; within a few years she fell in love with her future husband, H. G. Green, and was no doubt happier than she would have been if she had married Bailey and migrated to Ceylon.

Quite friendly with Leigh Hunt early in his career, Reynolds paid him an enthusiastic compliment as a poet in a footnote to The Eden of Imagination (1814). On 7 April 1816 he presented him favorably in “The Pilgrimage of the Living Poets to the Stream of Castaly.”⁶¹ When he visited the Leigh sisters in September 1816, he respected Hunt enough to copy in a commonplace book Hunt's manuscript sonnet before it was published.⁶² During the first year of his friendship with Keats, he spent much time socially in Hunt's company, exchanged complimentary sonnets with him, and was grateful, we can assume, for Hunt's high praise in “Young Poets.” On 10 September 1817 Reynolds's attitude toward Hunt shifted when he met Hunt in the pit at Drury Lane, where he had gone to review for the Champion and Hunt for the Examiner.⁶³ When he told Hunt that Keats was progressing toward the completion of four thousand lines of Endymion, Hunt replied possessively: “Ah! … had it not been for me they would have been 7,000!”⁶⁴ Since he was still very close to Haydon, Reynolds's sympathy had been deflected away from Hunt by Haydon's quarrelling with him. Haydon had warned that Hunt was jealously seeking to preserve the idea that Keats was his protégé, and now Hunt's statement confirmed Haydon's assertion. Reynolds wrote Keats at Oxford of the incident, whereupon Keats conjured up an image of the scene in the theater, “I think I see you and Hunt meeting in the Pit,”⁶⁵ and launched into combined disparagement and praise of Hunt.

Thereafter Reynolds's attitude toward Hunt increased in antipathy. Although but one of his letters to Keats has survived, it is easy to understand why so many of Keats's attacks on Hunt were written to Reynolds: Keats was sure that Reynolds would be a receptive reader. Reynolds did not abandon his own liberal views—he contributed to John Hunt's Yellow Dwarf and he allowed Leigh Hunt to reprint his defense of Endymion in the Examiner—nor did he compromise his political principles by writing for the Tory press, but he sensed the danger to Keats's literary reputation posed by continued association in the public mind of Keats's name with Hunt's, and he sought to prevent it. He remonstrated successfully against a plan for publishing Hyperion in a joint volume with a work by Hunt.⁶⁶ When he reprinted the revised version of the early “Pilgrimage of the Living Poets” in 1820 as “Living Authors: A Dream,” he quietly omitted the favorable treatment of Hunt, compensating only slightly by adding in a footnote condescending praise of the Indicator as “a very clever little periodical work.”⁶⁷ Even more strongly than Keats, he reacted against Hunt's personal traits, writing John Taylor of “the vain and heartless eternity of M^r Leigh Hunt's indecent discoursings” and of “the irksome, wearing consciousness of a disgusting presence, than which I know of nothing more dispiriting.”⁶⁸ It is not surprising that Reynolds's savage private attacks cloaked by public civility left Hunt so baffled that he wrote Hazlitt, “Reynolds is a machine I don't see the meaning of.”⁶⁹

Many years later Charles Cowden Clarke, who remained unswervingly loyal to Hunt, noted that “Reynolds poisoned him [Keats] against Hunt—who never varied towards Keats.”⁷⁰ But that remark is only a partial truth; Clarke's love of Hunt led him to overstate the case. Reynolds reenforced a change in Keats's attitude, as Keats realized for himself Hunt's limitations and weaknesses.

After Reynolds's death, Charles W. Dilke wrote from general recollection that “in every number of the London the traces of his light and pleasant pen were visible.”⁷¹ The new letter to John Scott in this volume refines upon Dilke's memory by showing the date and circumstances of Reynolds's beginning his contributions, as well as identifying the long two-part essay “On Fighting” in his best lively and jocular manner.

As a contributor to the London, he became involved indirectly in the duel which led to the death of its first editor, John Scott, and he and Rice served as attorneys for Scott's second, Peter G. Patmore, in the legal action that followed. After Taylor and Hessey acquired the magazine in 1821, for three and a half years he assisted with the editing and wrote most of the theatrical reviews, epistolary articles under the pseudonym Edward Herbert, other literary articles, reviews of current books, and poems. Although Dilke's statement that these years were “the only true period of his literary life”⁷² is inaccurate because it neglects his achievement during Keats's lifetime, it serves to emphasize the success he enjoyed with the London. He published prose worthy to be printed along with the greatest prose geniuses of the period, Lamb and Hazlitt, and he joined Lamb, Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Bryan Waller Procter, John Clare, and other contributors at the convivial dinners given by John Taylor.

His long-delayed marriage to Eliza Powell Drewe on 31 August 1822, accompanied by the jubilation of many old members of the Keats circle as can be seen from Thomas Hood's comic progress to celebrate the event, led to many years of domestic happiness. Though he had lost Keats, he gained Hood, who married his sister Jane in 1825, and the second literary friendship flourished too.⁷³ What life was like in the Reynolds home at this time can best be seen in a passage from Hood's letter to Mrs. Reynolds about January 1823 when he was engaged to Jane:

I shall need all my strength if you expect me to come and romp with your grandchild [Eliza Reynolds Longmore's baby]. My dear Jane writes that owing to Mr. Acland's delay, it is likely that they may not come up till the week after next. Pray make use of the interval in double-bracing your nerves against “the little sensible Longmore.” She will put you to your Hop-Tea. I expect she will quite revolutionise Little Britain. The awful brow of Mariane, the muscular powers of Lottie, the serious remonstrances of Aunt Jane, the maternal and grand-maternal authorities will be set at naught with impunity. As for Green [Mariane's suitor] and I, we shall come up empty about dinner-time, and in the hubbub, be sent empty away. The old china will be cracked like mad; the tour-terelles, finger-blotted and spoiled; the chintz—now couleur de rose—all rumpled and unflounced! …

Think of your good and clever daughters, who paint sea nymphs, and sing, and play on the piano; and of your son John, dear to the Muses. I think few families have been dealt with so well, if, indeed, any. There's Jane, and Eliza, Mariane, and Lottie,—four Queens; and John,—you must count “two for his nob.”⁷⁴

The scene here depicted supplements Keats's more fragmentary references to suggest the appeal of this cultured and hospitable home five years before to John, George, and Tom Keats, Rice, Bailey, Woodhouse, and Charles and Maria Dilke.

When he left the London, Reynolds's comic and satirical gifts continued, first in a sparkling attack on John Wilson in the Westminster Review and then in his greatest popular success in 1825, Odes and Addresses to Great People, the work produced anonymously with Hood which Coleridge was certain that no one but Lamb could have written. From 1828 through 8 June 1831 he owned part of the Athenaeum, but he unfortunately sold his share to protest Dilke's cutting the price in half. He must have regretted that step sorely as Dilke's judgment proved sound and the magazine prospered, while his own financial situation grew ever more desperate. He managed, however, to supplement his income from law by contributing steadily to the Athenaeum through 1837; as pedestrian as much of that work was, he deserves credit for leading Dilke's campaign against the corrupt puffing of new books. Theatrical writing also augmented his income: to the operetta Gil Blas of 1822 and the Mathews monologues of the twenties, he added in the thirties Fanny Kelley's Recollections (1830), A New Entertainment (1833), and Confounded Foreigners (1838).

The Garrick Club, which he joined as a charter member in 1831, provided an opportunity to meet socially with Thackeray and Richard Harris Barham, both of whom sought to assist him in placing his work in periodicals. The new Garrick Club letters in this volume display some small but attractive facets of his character. He shows his solicitousness for Eliza by ordering special meat for her in her illness. He reveals his kindliness toward the old porter, whom other members wanted discharged because of senility, by requesting that he be given the convenience of a chair and a rug.

After more than a decade of family harmony in his close and happy association with Hood, in 1835 Hood quarreled bitterly with the Reynolds family, as Jane lay desperately ill. Although Hood specifically excepted Reynolds from the angry blasts that he fired at the other members of the family, Reynolds must have been sorely grieved by this family friction. In the same year his life was darkened further by the death at the age of ten of his daughter, Lucy, the only child surviving after the death of an infant years before.⁷⁵

On 26 October 1838 a long history of financial difficulties resulted in a certificate of bankruptcy. The increasing need for money pressed him to cease contributing to the respected Athenaeum and to turn instead to the less dignified but more lucrative New Sporting Magazine, which he edited through 1840. After long service as Hood's attorney, he was dismissed in 1841, and that abrupt action probably marked a break in the old friendship.⁷⁶ During his last decade, he clung precariously to the small prestige of a free-lance author by contributing to Ainsworth's Magazine, the New Monthly, and Bentley's Miscellany. The letters to Richard Bentley, new in this book, identify another series of essays in the Miscellany, including copious paraphrases of Latin verse, though neither prose nor verse is superior in quality to his late work which has long been known.

Abandoning private legal practice in 1847, he secured a position as assistant clerk of the county court at Newport in the Isle of Wight, where he spent his last five years. Having procrastinated his own life of Keats for twenty-five years, he was pleased to cooperate enthusiastically with Richard Monckton Milnes in preparing the first extensive biography. In other respects his last years were gloomy. Although Lord Ernle may have exaggerated somewhat in calling him “a broken-down, discontented man … whose drunken habits placed him beyond the pale of society,”⁷⁷ since he did function responsibly and earn the respect of many in the Isle of Wight,⁷⁸ it is clear that he drank heavily and that he was usually unhappy and depressed before he died on 15 November 1852. Lord Ernle meant to damn him by charging that he went to his grave a “professed … Unitarian and a bitter Radical,” but for that integrity Hazlitt would have been proud of his old comrade on the Yellow Dwarf in the campaign against autocratic kings and self-serving prelates.

Notes

1. Guildhall Library, London, MS 5266, vol. 4; MS 5265, vol. 5; MS 5257, vol. 10; and MS 5257, vol. 11, as recorded in Robert Gittings, “The Poetry of John Hamilton Reynolds,” Ariel, I (1970), 8-9 (hereafter cited as Gittings).

2. George L. Marsh, John Hamilton Reynolds: Poetry and Prose (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. 10-11 (hereafter cited as J. H. R.: Poetry and Prose).

3. Edinburgh Review, XXX (June 1817), 260.

4. See p. 17 below.

5. Henry C. Shelley, Literary By-paths in Old England (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1906), pp. 222-23 (hereafter cited as Shelley).

6. Phyllis G. Mann, “The Reynolds Family,” Keats-Shelley Journal, V (1956), 6.

7. Gittings, pp. 9-10.

8. John F. M. Dovaston, Fitz-Gwarine, with Other Rhymes (Shrewsbury, 1813).

9. Leonidas M. Jones, ed., Selected Prose of John Hamilton Reynolds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 309-11 (hereafter cited as Selected Prose).

10. Guildhall Library, MS 5265.

11. Mann, “The Reynolds Family,” p. 7. Many records erroneously report the date of her birth as 1792.

12. I follow Hyder Rollins in spelling the name as her son always spelled it. Keats and others spell it variously and inconsistently.

13. Leonidas M. Jones, “New Letters, Articles, and Poems by John Hamilton Reynolds,” Keats-Shelley Journal, VI (1957), 103.

14. London Magazine, VII (May 1823), 525-26.

15. Ibid., IX (January 1824), 35-36.

16. Ibid., IV (July 1821), 8-9.

17. John Masefield, ed., The Fancy (London: Elkin Mathews, 1905).

18. Selected Prose, pp. 261-63.

19. Marsh, J. H. R.: Poetry and Prose, p. 11.

20. Richard Harris Barham, The Garrick Club (New York: privately printed, 1896), p. 42.

21. Marsh, J. H. R.: Poetry and Prose, pp. 12-13.

22. Gittings, p. 10.

23. A manuscript book of the constitution, laws, and minutes of the society is in the Houghton Library at Harvard.

24. Selected Prose, p. 252. This was the only logical time for the meeting between them which Reynolds reported.

25. Gittings, p. 12.

26. Clayton E. Hudnall, “John Hamilton Reynolds, James Rice, and Benjamin Bailey in the Leigh Browne-Lockyer Collection,” Keats-Shelley Journal, XIX (1970), 13 (hereafter cited as Hudnall).

27. Ibid., p. 17.

28. Ibid., p. 18.

29. Ibid., p. 38.

30. Cf. Cowper, The Task, IV. 36-37.

31. By Mr. M'Kenzie in the New Novelist's Magazine, 1786, pp. 151-55.

32. Hudnall, pp. 31-32.

33. Ibid., p. 34.

34. See p. 4 below.

35. Gittings, p. 11, reports the friendship of the Reynoldses and Butlers and states that the Butlers had lived in Lambeth. Eliza's father and brother George (and presumably also her mother) having died before the wedding to John, Mrs. Butler represents for Eliza's side “The Head of the Family” in Hood's progress celebrating the wedding (Shelley, p. 325); she was therefore especially close to Eliza.

36. On the much discussed question of the date of the first meeting, Robert Gittings has the last, and I believe accurate, word in John Keats (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1968), p. 83.

37. Hyder E. Rollins, ed., The Keats Circle, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), I, 4-5 (hereafter cited as KC).

38. Gittings, John Keats, pp. 92-93.

39. Mann, “The Reynolds Family,” p. 6.

40. Shelley, p. 326.

41. See p. 13 below.

42. Hyder E. Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), I, 325 (hereafter cited as Letters).

43. Marsh, J. H. R.: Poetry and Prose, pp. 21-22.

44. Letters, I, 276-77.

45. Ibid., II, 78.

46. Ibid.

47. John G. Lockhart, Peter's Letters to His Kin-Folk, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1819), II, 227-28. Published before 19 July 1819, when Sir Walter Scott acknowledged receipt of his copy.

48. Alan Lang Strout, “Knights of the Burning Epistle,” Studia Neophilologica, XXVI (1953-54), 85.

49. Letters, II, 178-79.

50. Gittings, p. 13.

51. KC, I, 4-6.

52. Letters, I, 183.

53. Ibid., I, 205.

54. Selected Prose, pp. 414-15.

55. Ibid., p. 215.

56. Letters, II, 67.

57. Hudnall, p. 25.

58. Letters, II, 67.

59. Ibid., II, 66.

60. KC, I, 232.

61. Selected Prose, p. 48.

62. Hudnall, pp. 20-21n.

63. Letters, I, 162, 169. Files of the two newspapers reveal the date and place. Reynolds wrote no review for 7 September 1817. For 14 September 1817 Reynolds and Hunt reviewed the same performance, and both mention attending on the same night, 10 September.

64. Ibid., I, 169.

65. Ibid., I, 162.

66. See p. 66 below.

67. Selected Prose, p. 256n.

68. See p. 22 below.

69. Percival P. Howe, The Life of William Hazlitt, 3d ed. (London: Hamilton, 1947), p. 291.

70. The Novello-Cowden Clarke Collection (University of Leeds, 1955), p. 9.

71. Athenaeum, 27 November 1852, p. 1296.

72. Notes and Queries, 4 October 1856, p. 275.

73. For detailed accounts of the Reynolds-Hood relationship, see Alvin Whitley, “Keats and Hood,” Keats-Shelley Journal, V (1956), 33-47, and Peter F. Morgan, “John Hamilton Reynolds and Thomas Hood,” Keats-Shelley Journal, XI (1962), 83-95.

74. Shelley, pp. 329-30. For non-cribbage players, the nob is the jack, held in the hand, of the same suit as the card turned up. It counts one in the game; Hood shows his admiration for Reynolds by doubling his nob. Keats occasionally called him Jack too.

75. KC, I, cxxi.

76. Morgan, “John Hamilton Reynolds and Thomas Hood,” pp. 90-91.

77. Rowland E. Prothero, Lord Ernle, The Works of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, 6 vols. (London: John Murray, 1898-1901), III, 46n.

78. Willard B. Pope, “John Hamilton Reynolds, the Friend of Keats,” Wessex, III (1935), 3-15.