ABSTRACT
Mr. Holmes and Mr. Felton Mathew supplied all their recollections of his boyhood; Mr. Reynolds, whom Mr. Leigh Hunt, in the “Examiner” of 1816, associated with Shelley and Keats as the three poets of promise whom time was ripening, contributed the rich store of correspondence, which began with Keats’s introduction into literary society, and never halted to the last. Mr. Haslam and Mr. Dilke aided with letters and remembrances, and many persons who casually heard of the project forwarded information that circumstances had placed in their way. Mr. Leigh Hunt had already laid his offering on the shrine of his beloved brother in the trials and triumphs of genius. Biography, though differing in some essentials from works of fiction, is nevertheless like them an art—an art, the laws of which are determined by the imperfections of our nature and the constitution of society.
