ABSTRACT
Poem entitled ‘To a Poetical Friend’, signed ‘G.F.M.’, in the European Magazine, and London Review, (October 1816), lxx, 365. George Felton Mathew, a few months older than Keats and author of a review of his Poems (No. 6), worked in business and on the Poor Law Commission. He had known Keats for some years in 1816 and had received one of Keats's verse Epistles (November 1815), which is quoted in this poem. Although the poem praises early ‘tales of chivalry’ in the manner of ‘Calidore’ and ‘Specimen of an Induction to a Poem’, it is in the metre of Keats's ‘On Receiving a curious Shell’, which was addressed to Mathew's cousins Caroline and Ann, and it quotes the last two lines of Keats's sonnet beginning ‘O Solitude!’
