Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III WINTER 1816-1817: HAYDON: OTHER NEW FRIENDSHIPS: THE DIE CAST FOR POETRY Haydon and the Elgin marbles—Haydon as painter and writer—Vanity, pugnacity, and piety—Haydon on Leigh Hunt—Keats and Haydon meet—An enthusiastic friendship—Keats and the Elgin marbles— Sonnets and protestations—Hazlitt and Lamb—Friendship of Hunt and Shelley—Lamb and Hazlitt on Shelley—Haydon and Shelley: a battle royal—Keats and Shelley—A cool relation—John Hamilton Reynolds—His devotion to Keats—The Reynolds sisters—James Rice —Charles Wells—William Haslam—Joseph Severn—Keats judged by his circle—Described by Severn—His range of sympathies—His poetic ambition—The die is cast—First volume goes to press. So much for the relations of Keats with Hunt himself in these first six months of their intimacy. Next of the other intimacies which he formed with friends to whom Hunt introduced him. One of the first of these, and for a while the most stimulating and engrossing, was with the painter Haydon. This remarkable man, now just thirty, had lately been victorious in one of the two great objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory in the other. For the last eight years he had fought and laboured to win national recognition for the deserts of Lord Elgin in his great work of salvage—for such under the conditions of the time it was—in bringing away the remains of the Parthenon sculptures from Athens. By dint of sheer justice of conviction and power of fight, and then only when he had been reinforced in the campaign by foreigners of indisputable authority like the archaeologist Visconti and the sculptor Canova, he had succeeded in getting the pre-eminence of these marbles among all60 HAYDON AND THE ELGIN MARBLES works of the sculptor's art acknowledged, and their ac... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.