wife, as in the case of Keats himself, and of his lovers, Lorenzo and Porphyrio.

To express this was perhaps the daring of real innocence, which is entirely different from the modesty of the libertine. Byron can be gross enough when humorous, but in passion he is decorous. Keats consciously preferred this openness. He told Miss Brawne that he preferred the "common gossip of washerwomen" to the "continual and eternal fence and attack of Rousseau and these sublime Petticoats" in "La Nouvelle Heloise"; and he thanked God she was fair and could love him without being "letter-written and sentimentaliz'd into it." Part of his uneasiness with women and his poor opinion of them may have been due to the necessity for indirectness and ceremony in their company. He would not be "a pet-lamb in a sentimental farce"; he hated love as a doll "for idleness to cosset, nurse and dandle." preferred the country strain of "Where be you going, you Devon Maid?" To the end, though he could make poetry of the grief of Isabella, he treated women as accessories, saving only "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," and she is supernatural. In his own life most likely they had been accessories. There is reason for concluding that he knew chiefly an inferior type of woman, showy and flighty

He

girls who aped their social betters and lived directly upon flattery; and among these a man like Keats would seek prettiness and expect nothing else. His poems show that he found nothing else.

Chapter Nine: Patronesses

HE least important and attractive relation of women to poets is, or

T

was, that of patrons. The Duchess of Queensberry, a patron of Gay, got herself dismissed from the court of George II. by her zeal in asking subscriptions for the poet's prohibited opera, Polly." He had before he was thirty been secretary or domestic steward to the Duchess of Monmouth and so found leisure to write "Rural Sports." Swift said that "any lady with a coach and six horses could carry him to Japan," and during his last twelve years the Queensberrys, in town and country, often gave him a life of comfort, plenty of rich food and no exercise, such as he desired. In the same way Thomas Nashe lived with Sir George Carey at Beddington, and dedicated to the wife and daughter of the house "Christ's Tears" and "Terrors of the Night." When Gay died the Duchess and Duke put up his monument in Westminster Abbey. So Mary Clifford, Countess of Dorset, gave to Drayton a bust and an inscription on black marble in the same place. Another Clifford, Anne, daughter of Spenser's Countess of Cumberland, erected a monument to Samuel Daniel at Beckington, near Devizes. In return for such present

and future advantages the poets wrote verses, not often their best, and prose in which their noble patronesses were called the "English Sappho" or "the true Octavia of our time," after the sister of Augustus and mother of Marcellus, who gave Virgil ten thousand sesterces for each of the verses about her dead son in the sixth book of the " Æneid." In a sonnet to the Lady Anne Harington, Drayton says precisely, "Your bounty bids my hand to make it known." Giles Fletcher tells the reader of his love sonnets, dedicated to Lady Molineux, that if he had not received unrequitable favours from her and good Sir Richard Molineux, he had not "thus idly toyed"; nor is it surprising to find amidst the sonnets to Licia, one on "the two twins and daughters of Lady Molineux, both passing like and exceeding fair."

It is seldom clear that patronesses had more to dispense than meat and wine and

sweet showers" of gold; as a rule only the ceremonious part of the intercourse has left its traces, and it may be that this often overshadowed the rest. We have no idea whether there was anything but well-founded politeness in Spenser's dedication of his hymns to Love and Beauty, and Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty, to Margaret Countess of Cumberland, and Mary Countess of War

wick; but we do know that one of them moved him to recall, as being "fuller of the poison of strong passion than honey of honest delight," the hymns to profane Love and Beauty. Some of these great ladies may have been good judges of poetry, though, as M. Maulde la Clavière says, "as a rule Egerias have less need of a transcendent intellect than of an ample possession of good sense, tact, and above all, patience." At thirteen Lady Jane Grey read and spoke Greek, and was learning Hebrew at fifteen. The Marchioness of Winchester, for whom Jonson composed an elegy, wrote verses and knew Spanish, and was called by Howell an exact model of female perfection." Sidney's sister, Lady Pembroke, was of the same rank as himself in mind and character: his niece, Lady Wroth, wrote prose and verse in her pastoral "Urania," and Jonson dedicated his Alchemist" to her, and paid her extreme compliments of this kind:

There's none so dull that for your style would ask, That saw you put on Pallas' plumèd casque. . . . Another patroness of the day, the Countess of Rutland, he describes as making her books. her friends

You make your books your friends,

And study them unto the noblest ends,