KEARY, ANNIE(1825-1879), English novelist, was born near Wetherby, Yorkshire, on the 3rd of March 1825, the daughter of an Irish clergyman. She was the author of several children’s books and novels, of which the best known isCastle Daly, an Irish story. She also wrote anEarly Egyptian History(1861) andThe Nation Around(1870). She died at Eastbourne on the 3rd of March 1879.
KEATE, JOHN(1773-1852), English schoolmaster, was born at Wells, Somersetshire, in 1773, the son of Prebendary William Keate. He was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, where he had a brilliant career as a scholar; taking holy orders, he became, about 1797, an assistant master at Eton College. In 1809 he was elected headmaster. The discipline of the school was then in a most unsatisfactory condition, and Dr Keate (who took the degree of D.D. in 1810) took stern measures to improve it. His partiality for the birch became a by-word, but he succeeded in restoring order and strengthening the weakened authority of the masters. Beneath an outwardly rough manner the little man concealed a really kind heart, and when he retired in 1834, the boys, who admired his courage, presented him with a handsome testimonial. A couple of years before he had publicly flogged eighty boys on one day. Keate was made a canon of Windsor in 1820. He died on the 5th of March 1852 at Hartley Westpall, Hampshire, of which parish he had been rector since 1824.
See Maxwell Lyte,History of Eton College(3rd ed., 1899); Collins,Etoniana; Harwood,Alumni Etonienses;Annual Register(1852);Gentleman’s Magazine(1852).
See Maxwell Lyte,History of Eton College(3rd ed., 1899); Collins,Etoniana; Harwood,Alumni Etonienses;Annual Register(1852);Gentleman’s Magazine(1852).
KEATS, JOHN(1795-1821), English poet, was born on the 29th or 31st of October 1795 at the sign of the Swan and Hoop, 24 The Pavement, Moorfields, London. He published his first volume of verse in 1817, his second in the following year, his third in 1820, and died of consumption at Rome on the 23rd of February 1821 in the fourth month of his twenty-sixth year. (For the biographical facts see the later section of this article.)
In Keats’s first book there was little foretaste of anything greatly or even genuinely good; but between the marshy and sandy flats of sterile or futile verse there were undoubtedly some few purple patches of floral promise. The style was frequently detestable—a mixture of sham Spenserian and mock Wordsworthian, alternately florid and arid. His second book,Endymion, rises in its best passages to the highest level of Barnfield and of Lodge, the two previous poets with whom, had he published nothing more, he might most properly have been classed; and this, among minor minstrels, is no unenviable place. His third book raised him at once to a foremost rank in the highest class of English poets. Shelley, up to twenty, had written little or nothing that would have done credit to a boy of ten; and of Keats also it may be said that the merit of his work at twenty-five was hardly by comparison more wonderful than its demerit at twenty-two. His first book fell as flat as it deserved to fall; the reception of his second, though less considerate than on the whole it deserved, was not more contemptuous than that of immeasurably better books published about the same time by Coleridge, Landor and Shelley. A critic of exceptional carefulness and candour might have noted in the first book so singular an example of a stork among the cranes as the famous and notable sonnet on Chapman’s Homer; a just judge would have indicated, a partial advocate might have exaggerated, the value of such golden grain amid a garish harvest of tares as the hymn to Pan and the translation into verse of Titian’s Bacchanal which glorify the weedy wilderness ofEndymion. But the hardest thing said of that poem by theQuarterlyreviewer was unconsciously echoed by the future author ofAdonais—that it was all but absolutely impossible to read through; and the obscener insolence of the “Blackguard’s Magazine,” as Landor afterwards very justly labelled it, is explicable though certainly not excusable if we glance back at such a passage as that where Endymion exchanges fulsome and liquorish endearments with the “known unknownfrom whom his being sips such darling (!) essence.” Such nauseous and pitiful phrases as these, and certain passages in his correspondence, make us understand the source of the most offensive imputations or insinuations levelled against the writer’s manhood; and, while admitting that neither his love-letters, nor the last piteous outcries of his wailing and shrieking agony, would ever have been made public by merciful or respectful editors, we must also admit that, if they ought never to have been published, it is no less certain that they ought never to have been written; that a manful kind of man or even a manly sort of boy, in his love-making or in his suffering, will not howl and snivel after such a lamentable fashion. One thing hitherto inexplicable a very slight and rapid glance at his amatory correspondence will amply suffice to explain: how it came to pass that the woman so passionately beloved by so great a poet should have thought it the hopeless attempt of a mistaken kindness to revive the memory of a man for whom the best that could be wished was complete and compassionate oblivion. For the side of the man’s nature presented to her inspection, this probably was all that charity or reason could have desired. But that there was a finer side to the man, even if considered apart from the poet, his correspondence with his friends and their general evidence to his character give more sufficient proof than perhaps we might have derived from the general impression left on us by his works; though indeed the preface toEndymionitself, however illogical in its obviously implied suggestion that the poem published was undeniably unworthy of publication, gave proof or hint at least that after all its author was something of a man. And the eighteenth of his letters to Miss Brawne stands out in bright and brave contrast with such as seem incompatible with the traditions of his character on its manlier side. But if it must be said that he lived long enough only to give promise of being a man, it must also be said that he lived long enough to give assurance of being a poet who was not born to come short of the first rank. Not even a hint of such a probability could have been gathered from his first or even from his second appearance; after the publication of his third volume it was no longer a matter of possible debate among judges of tolerable competence that this improbability had become a certainty. Two or three phrases cancelled, two or three lines erased, would have left us inLamiaone of the most faultless as surely as one of the most glorious jewels in the crown of English poetry.Isabella, feeble and awkward in narrative to a degree almost incredible in a student of Dryden and a pupil of Leigh Hunt, is overcharged with episodical effects of splendid and pathetic expression beyond the reach of either.The Eve of St Agnes, aiming at no doubtful success, succeeds in evading all casual difficulty in the line of narrative; with no shadow of pretence to such interest as may be derived from stress of incident or depth of sentiment, it stands out among all other famous poems as a perfect and unsurpassable study in pure colour and clear melody—a study in which the figure of Madeline brings back upon the mind’s eye, if only as moonlight recalls a sense of sunshine, the nuptial picture of Marlowe’s Hero and the sleeping presence of Shakespeare’s Imogen. Beside this poem should always be placed the less famous but not less preciousEve of St Mark, a fragment unexcelled for the simple perfection of its perfect simplicity, exquisite alike in suggestion and in accomplishment. The triumph ofHyperionis as nearly complete as the failure ofEndymion; yet Keats never gave such proof of a manly devotion and rational sense of duty to his art as in his resolution to leave this great poem unfinished; not, as we may gather from his correspondence on the subject, for the pitiful reason assigned by his publishers, that of discouragement at the reception given to his former work, but on the solid and reasonable ground that a Miltonic study had something in its very scheme and nature too artificial, too studious of a foreign influence, to be carried on and carried out at such length as was implied by his original design. Fortified and purified as it had been on a first revision, when much introductory allegory and much tentative effusion of sonorous and superfluous verse had been rigorously clipped down or pruned away, it could not long have retained spirit enough to support or inform the shadowy body of a subject so little charged with tangible significance. The faculty of assimilation as distinguished from imitation, than which there can be no surer or stronger sign of strong and sure original genius, is not more evident in the most Miltonic passages of the revisedHyperionthan in the more Shakespearian passages of the unrevised tragedy which no radical correction could have left other than radically incorrigible. It is no conventional exaggeration, no hyperbolical phrase of flattery with more sound than sense in it, to say that in this chaotic and puerile play ofOtho the Greatthere are such verses as Shakespeare might not without pride have signed at the age when he wrote and even at the age when he rewrote the tragedy ofRomeo and Juliet. The dramatic fragment ofKing Stephenshows far more power of hand and gives far more promise of success than does that of Shelley’sCharles the First. Yet we cannot say with any confidence that even this far from extravagant promise would certainly or probably have been kept; it is certain only that Keats in these attempts did at least succeed in showing a possibility of future excellence as a tragic or at least a romantic dramatist. In every other line of high and serious poetry his triumph was actual and consummate; here only was it no more than potential or incomplete. As a ballad of the more lyrical order,La Belle dame sans merciis not less absolutely excellent, less triumphantly perfect in force and clearness of impression, that as a narrative poem isLamia. In his lines on Robin Hood, and in one or two other less noticeable studies of the kind, he has shown thorough and easy mastery of the beautiful metre inherited by Fletcher from Barnfield and by Milton from Fletcher. The simple force of spirit and style which distinguishes the genuine ballad manner from all spurious attempts at an artificial simplicity was once more at leastachieved in his verses on the crowning creation of Scott’s humaner and manlier genius—Meg Merrilies. No little injustice has been done to Keats by such devotees as fix their mind’s eye only on the more salient and distinctive notes of a genius which in fact was very much more various and tentative, less limited and peculiar, than would be inferred from an exclusive study of his more specially characteristic work. But within the limits of that work must we look of course for the genuine credentials of his fame; and highest among them we must rate his unequalled and unrivalled odes. Of these perhaps the two nearest to absolute perfection, to the triumphant achievement and accomplishment of the very utmost beauty possible to human words, may be that to Autumn and that on a Grecian Urn; the most radiant, fervent and musical is that to a Nightingale; the most pictorial and perhaps the tenderest in its ardour of passionate fancy is that to Psyche; the subtlest in sweetness of thought and feeling is that on Melancholy. Greater lyrical poetry the world may have seen than any that is in these; lovelier it surely has never seen, nor ever can it possibly see. From the divine fragment of an unfinished ode to Maia we can but guess that if completed it would have been worthy of a place beside the highest. His remaining lyrics have many beauties about them, but none perhaps can be called thoroughly beautiful. He has certainly left us one perfect sonnet of the first rank and as certainly he has left us but one.
Keats has been promoted by modern criticism to a place beside Shakespeare. The faultless force and the profound subtlety of his deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty can hardly be questioned or overlooked; and this is doubtless the one main distinctive gift or power which denotes him as a poet among all his equals, and gives him a right to rank for ever beside Coleridge and Shelley. As a man, the two admirers who did best service to his memory were Lord Houghton and Matthew Arnold. These alone, among all of their day who have written of him without the disadvantage or advantage of a personal acquaintance, have clearly seen and shown us the manhood of the man. That ridiculous and degrading legend which imposed so strangely on the generous tenderness of Shelley, while evoking the very natural and allowable laughter of Byron, fell to dust at once for ever on the appearance of Lord Houghton’s biography, which gave perfect proof to all time that “men have died and worms have eaten them” but not for fear of critics or through suffering inflicted by reviews. Somewhat too sensually sensitive Keats may have been in either capacity, but the nature of the man was as far as was the quality of the poet above the pitiful level of a creature whose soul could “let itself be snuffed out by an article”; and, in fact, owing doubtless to the accident of a death which followed so fast on his early appearance and his dubious reception as a poet, the insolence and injustice of his reviewers in general have been comparatively and even considerably exaggerated. Except from the chief fountain-head of professional ribaldry then open in the world of literary journalism, no reek of personal insult arose to offend his nostrils; and the tactics of such unwashed malignants were inevitably suicidal; the references to his brief experiment of apprenticeship to a surgeon which are quoted fromBlackwood, in the shorter as well as in the longer memoir by Lord Houghton, could leave no bad odour behind them save what might hang about men’s yet briefer recollection of his assailant’s unmemorable existence. The false Keats, therefore, whom Shelley pitied and Byron despised would have been, had he ever existed, a thing beneath compassion or contempt. That such a man could have had such a genius is almost evidently impossible; and yet more evident is the proof which remains on everlasting record that none was ever further from the chance of decline to such degradation than the real and actual man who made that name immortal.
(A. C. S.)
Subjoined are the chief particulars of Keats’s life.
He was the eldest son of Thomas Keats and his wife Frances Jennings, and was baptized at St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, on the 18th of December 1795. The entry of his baptism is supplemented by a marginal note stating that he was born on the 31st of October. Thomas Keats was employed in the Swan and Hoop livery stables, Finsbury Pavement, London. He had married his master’s daughter, and managed the business on the retirement of his father-in-law. In April 1804 Thomas Keats was killed by a fall from his horse, and within a year of this event Mrs Keats married William Rawlings, a stable-keeper. The marriage proved an unhappy one, and in 1806 Mrs Rawlings, with her children John, George, Thomas and Frances Mary (afterwards Mrs Llanos, d. 1889), went to live at Edmonton with her mother, who had inherited a considerable competence from her husband. There is evidence that Keats’s parents were by no means of the commonplace type that might be hastily inferred from these associations. They had desired to send their sons to Harrow, but John Keats and his two brothers were eventually sent to a school kept by John Clarke at Enfield, where he became intimate with his master’s son, Charles Cowden Clarke. His vivacity of temperament showed itself at school in a love of fighting, but in the last year of his school life he developed a great appetite for reading of all sorts. In 1810 he left school to be apprenticed to Mr Thomas Hammond, a surgeon in Edmonton. He was still within easy reach of his old school, where he frequently borrowed books, especially the works of Spenser and the Elizabethans. With Hammond he quarrelled before the termination of his apprenticeship, and in 1814 the connexion was broken by mutual consent. His mother had died in 1810, and in 1814 Mrs Jennings. The children were left in the care of two guardians, one of whom, Richard Abbey, seems to have made himself solely responsible. John Keats went to London to study at Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospitals, living at first alone at 8 Dean Street, Borough, and later with two fellow students in St Thomas’s Street. It does not appear that he neglected his medical studies, but his chief interest was turned to poetry. In March 1816 he became a dresser at Guy’s, but about the same time his poetic gifts were stimulated by an acquaintance formed with Leigh Hunt. His friendship with Benjamin Haydon, the painter, dates from later in the same year. Hunt introduced him to Shelley, who showed the younger poet a constant kindness. In 1816 Keats moved to the Poultry to be with his brothers George and Tom, the former of whom was then employed in his guardian’s counting-house, but much of the poet’s time was spent at Leigh Hunt’s cottage at Hampstead. In the winter of 1816-1817 he definitely abandoned medicine, and in the spring appearedPoems by John Keatsdedicated to Leigh Hunt, and published by Charles and James Ollier. On the 14th of April he left London to find quiet for work. He spent some time at Shanklin, Isle of Wight, then at Margate and Canterbury, where he was joined by his brother Tom. In the summer the three brothers took lodgings in Well Walk, Hampstead, where Keats formed a fast friendship with Charles Wentworth Dilke and Charles Armitage Brown. In September of the same year (1817) he paid a visit to his friend, Benjamin Bailey, at Oxford, and in November he finishedEndymionat Burford Bridge, near Dorking. His youngest brother had developed consumption, and in March John went to Teignmouth to nurse him in place of his brother George, who had decided to sail for America with his newly married wife, Georgiana Wylie. In May (1818) Keats returned to London, and soon after appearedEndymion: A Poetic Romance(1818), bearing on the title-page as motto “The stretched metre of an antique song.” Late in June Keats and his friend Armitage Brown started on a walking tour in Scotland, vividly described in the poet’s letters. The fatigue and hardship involved proved too great a strain for Keats, who was forbidden by an Inverness doctor to continue his tour. He returned to London by boat, arriving on the 18th of August. The autumn was spent in constant attendance on his brother Tom, who died at the beginning of December. There is no doubt that he resented the attacks on him inBlackwood’s Magazine(August 1818), and theQuarterly Review(April 1818, published only in September), but his chief preoccupations were elsewhere. After his brother’s death he went to live with his friend Brown. He had already made the acquaintance of Fanny Brawne, a girl of seventeen, who lived with her mother close by. For her Keatsquickly developed a consuming passion. He was in indifferent health, and, owing partly to Mr Abbey’s mismanagement, in difficulties for money. Nevertheless his best work belongs to this period. In July 1819 he went to Shanklin, living with James Rice. They were soon joined by Brown. The next two months Keats spent with Brown at Winchester, enjoying an interval of calmness due to his absence from Fanny Brawne. At Winchester he completedLamiaandOtho the Great, which he had begun in conjunction with Brown, and began his historical tragedy ofKing Stephen. Before Christmas he had returned to London and his bondage to Fanny. In January 1820 his brother George paid a short visit to London, but received no confidence from him. The fatal nature of Keats’s illness showed itself on the 3rd of February, but in March he recovered sufficiently to be present at the private view of Haydon’s picture of “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” In May he removed to a lodging in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town, to be near Leigh Hunt who eventually took him into his house. In July appeared his third and last book,Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and other Poems(1820). Keats left the Hunts abruptly in August in consequence of a delay in receiving one of Fanny Brawne’s letters which had been broken open by a servant. He went to Wentworth Place, where he was taken in by the Brawnes. The suggestion that he should spend the winter in Italy was followed up by an invitation from Shelley to Pisa. This, however, he refused. But on the 18th of September 1820 he set out for Naples in company with Joseph Severn, the artist, who had long been his friend. The travellers settled in the Piazza de Spagna, Rome. Keats was devotedly tended by Dr (afterwards Sir) James Clarke and Severn, and died on the 23rd of February 1821. He was buried on the 27th in the old Protestant cemetery, near the pyramid of Cestius.
Bibliography.—Keats’s friends provided the material for the authoritative biography of the poet by Richard Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton) entitledLife, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats(1848; revised ed., 1867).The Poetical Works of John Keatswere issued with a memoir by R. M. Milnes in 1854, 1863, 1865, 1866, 1867, and in the Aldine edition, 1876. The standard edition of Keats isThe Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats now first brought together, including Poems and numerous Letters not before published, edited with notes and appendicesby Harry Buxton Forman (4 vols., 1883; re-issue with corrections and additions, 1889). Of the many other editions of Keats’s poems may be mentioned that in the Muses’ Library,The Poems of John Keats(1896), edited by G. Thorn Drury with an introduction by Robert Bridges, and another by E. de Sélincourt, 1905.The Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne(1889) were edited with introduction and notes by H. Buxton Forman, and theLetters of John Keats to his Family and Friends(1891) by Sidney Colvin, who is also the author of the monograph,Keats(1887), in the English Men of Letters Series. See alsoThe Papers of a Critic. Selected from the Writings of the late Charles Wentworth Dilke(1875), and for further bibliographical information and particulars of MS. sources the “Editor’s Preface,” &c. to a reprint edited by H. Buxton Forman (Glasgow, 1900). A facsimile of Keats’s autograph MS. of “Hyperion,” purchased by the British Museum in 1904, was published by E. de Sélincourt (Oxford, 1905).
Bibliography.—Keats’s friends provided the material for the authoritative biography of the poet by Richard Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton) entitledLife, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats(1848; revised ed., 1867).The Poetical Works of John Keatswere issued with a memoir by R. M. Milnes in 1854, 1863, 1865, 1866, 1867, and in the Aldine edition, 1876. The standard edition of Keats isThe Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats now first brought together, including Poems and numerous Letters not before published, edited with notes and appendicesby Harry Buxton Forman (4 vols., 1883; re-issue with corrections and additions, 1889). Of the many other editions of Keats’s poems may be mentioned that in the Muses’ Library,The Poems of John Keats(1896), edited by G. Thorn Drury with an introduction by Robert Bridges, and another by E. de Sélincourt, 1905.The Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne(1889) were edited with introduction and notes by H. Buxton Forman, and theLetters of John Keats to his Family and Friends(1891) by Sidney Colvin, who is also the author of the monograph,Keats(1887), in the English Men of Letters Series. See alsoThe Papers of a Critic. Selected from the Writings of the late Charles Wentworth Dilke(1875), and for further bibliographical information and particulars of MS. sources the “Editor’s Preface,” &c. to a reprint edited by H. Buxton Forman (Glasgow, 1900). A facsimile of Keats’s autograph MS. of “Hyperion,” purchased by the British Museum in 1904, was published by E. de Sélincourt (Oxford, 1905).
(M. Br.)
KEBLE, JOHN(1792-1866), English poet and divine, the author of theChristian Year, was born on St Mark’s Day (April 25), 1792, at Fairford, Gloucestershire. He was the second child of the Rev. John Keble and his wife Sarah Maule. Descended from a family which had attained some legal eminence in the time of the Commonwealth, John Keble, the father of the poet, was vicar of Coln St Aldwyn, but lived at Fairford, about 3 m. distant from his cure. He was a clergyman of the old High Church school, whose adherents, untouched by the influence of the Wesleys, had moulded their piety on the doctrines on the non-jurors and the old Anglican divines. Himself a good scholar, he did not send his son to any school, but educated him and his brother at home so well that both obtained scholarships at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. John was elected scholar of Corpus in his fifteenth, and fellow of Oriel in his nineteenth year, April 1811. In Easter term 1810 he had obtained double first class honours, a distinction which had been obtained only once before, by Sir Robert Peel. After his election to the Oriel fellowship Keble gained the University prizes, both for the English essay and also for the Latin essay. But he was more remarkable for the rare beauty of his character than even for academic distinctions. Sir John Taylor Coleridge, his fellow scholar at Corpus and his life-long friend, says of him, after their friendship of five and fifty years had closed, “It was the singular happiness of his nature, remarkable even in his undergraduate days, that love for him was always sanctified by reverence—reverence that did not make the love less tender, and love that did but add intensity to the reverence.” Oriel College was, at the time when Keble became a fellow, the centre of all the finest ability in Oxford. Copleston, Davison, Whately, were among the fellows who elected Keble; Arnold, Pusey, Newman, were soon after added to the society. In 1815 Keble was ordained deacon, and priest in 1816. His real bent and choice were towards a pastoral cure in a country parish; but he remained in Oxford, acting first as a public examiner in the schools, then as a tutor in Oriel, till 1823. In summer he sometimes took clerical work, sometimes made tours on foot through various English counties, during which he was composing poems, which afterwards took their place in theChristian Year. He had a rare power of attracting to himself the finest spirits, a power which lay not so much in his ability or his genius as in his character, so simple, so humble, so pure, so unworldly, yet wanting not that severity which can stand by principle and maintain what he holds to be the truth. In 1823 he returned to Fairford, there to assist his father, and with his brother to serve one or two small and poorly endowed curacies in the neighbourhood of Coln. He had made a quiet but deep impression on all who came within his influence in Oxford, and during his five years of college tutorship had won the affection of his pupils. But it was to pastoral work, and not to academic duty, that he thenceforth devoted himself, associating with it, and scarcely placing on a lower level, the affectionate discharge of his duties as a son and brother. Filial piety influenced in a quite unusual degree his feelings and his action all life through. It was in 1827, a few years after he settled at Fairford, that he published theChristian Year. The poems which make up that book had been the silent gathering of years. Keble had purposed in his own mind to keep them beside him, correcting and improving them, as long as he lived, and to leave them to be published only “when he was fairly out of the way.” This resolution was at length overcome by the importunities of his friends, and above all by the strong desire of his father to see his son’s poems in print before he died. Accordingly they were printed in two small volumes in Oxford, and given to the world in June 1827, but with no name on the title-page. The book continued to be published anonymously, but the name of the author soon transpired.
Between 1827 and 1872 one hundred and fifty-eight editions had issued from the press, and it has been largely reprinted since. The author, so far from taking pride in his widespread reputation, seemed all his life long to wish to disconnect his name with the book, and “as if he would rather it had been the work of some one else than himself.” This feeling arose from no false modesty. It was because he knew that in these poems he had painted his own heart, the best part of it; and he doubted whether it was right thus to exhibit himself, and by the revelation of only his better self, to win the good opinion of the world.
Towards the close of 1831 Keble was elected to fill the chair of the poetry professorship in Oxford, as successor to his friend and admirer, Dean Milman. This chair he occupied for ten eventful years. He delivered a series of lectures, clothed in excellent idiomatic Latin (as was the rule), in which he expounded a theory of poetry which was original and suggestive. He looked on poetry as a vent for overcharged feeling, or a full imagination, or some imaginative regret, which had not found their natural outlet in life and action. This suggested to him a distinction between what he called primary and secondary poets—the first employing poetry to relieve their own hearts, the second, poetic artists, composing poetry from some other and less impulsive motive. Of the former kind were Homer, Lucretius, Burns, Scott; of the latter were Euripides, Dryden, Milton. This view was set forth in an article contributed to theBritishCriticin 1838 on the life of Scott, and was more fully developed in two volumes ofPraelectiones Academicae.
His regular visits to Oxford kept him in intercourse with his old friends in Oriel common room, and made him familiar with the currents of feeling which swayed the university. Catholic emancipation and the Reform Bill had deeply stirred, not only the political spirit of Oxford, but also the church feeling which had long been stagnant. Cardinal Newman writes, “On Sunday July 14, 1833, Mr Keble preached the assize sermon in the University pulpit. It was published under the title ofNational Apostasy. I have ever considered and kept the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833.” The occasion of this sermon was the suppression, by Earl Grey’s Reform ministry, of ten Irish bishoprics. Against the spirit which would treat the church as the mere creature of the state Keble had long chafed inwardly, and now he made his outward protest, asserting the claim of the church to a heavenly origin and a divine prerogative. About the same time, and partly stimulated by Keble’s sermon, some leading spirits in Oxford and elsewhere began a concerted and systematic course of action to revive High Church principles and the ancient patristic theology, and by these means both to defend the church against the assaults of its enemies, and also to raise to a higher tone the standard of Christian life in England. This design embodied itself in the Tractarian movement, a name it received from the famousTracts for the Times, which were the vehicle for promulgating the new doctrines. If Keble is to be reckoned, as Newman would have it, as the primary author of the movement, it was from Pusey that it received one of its best known names, and in Newman that it soon found its genuine leader. To the tracts Keble made only four contributions:—No. 4, containing an argument, in the manner of Bishop Butler, to show that adherence to apostolical succession is the safest course; No. 13, which explains the principle on which the Sunday lessons in the church service are selected; No. 40, on marriage with one who is unbaptized; No. 89, on the mysticism attributed to the early fathers of the church. Besides these contributions from his own pen, he did much for the series by suggesting subjects, by reviewing tracts written by others, and by lending to their circulation the weight of his personal influence.
In 1835 Keble’s father died at the age of ninety, and soon after this his son married Miss Clarke, left Fairford, and settled at Hursley vicarage in Hampshire, a living to which he had been presented by his friend and attached pupil, Sir William Heathcote, and which continued to be Keble’s home and cure for the remainder of his life.
In 1841 the tracts were brought to an abrupt termination by the publication of Newman’s tract No. 90. All the Protestantism of England was in arms against the author of the obnoxious tract. Keble came forward at the time, desirous to share the responsibility and the blame, if there was any; for he had seen the tract before it was published, and approved it. The same year in which burst this ecclesiastical storm saw the close of Keble’s tenure of the professorship of poetry, and thenceforward he was seen but rarely in Oxford. No other public event ever affected Keble so deeply as the secession of Newman to the Church of Rome in 1845. It was to him both a public and a private sorrow, which nothing could repair. But he did not lose heart; at once he threw himself into the double duty, which now devolved on himself and Pusey, of counselling the many who had hitherto followed the movement, and who, now in their perplexity, might be tempted to follow their leader’s example, and at the same time of maintaining the rights of the church against what he held to be the encroachments of the state, as seen in such acts as the Gorham judgment, and the decision onEssays and Reviews. In all the ecclesiastical contests of the twenty years which followed 1845, Keble took a part, not loud or obtrusive, but firm and resolute, in maintaining those High Anglican principles with which his life had been identified. These absorbing duties, added to his parochial work, left little time for literature. But in 1846 he published theLyra Innocentium; and in 1863 he completed a life of Bishop Wilson.
In the late autumn of the latter year, Keble left Hursley for the sake of his wife’s health, and sought the milder climate of Bournemouth. There he had an attack of paralysis, from which he died on the 29th of March 1866. He was buried in his own churchyard at Hursley; and in little more than a month his wife was laid by her husband’s side.
Keble also publishedA Metrical Version of the Psalter(1839),Lyra Innocentium(1846), and a volume of poems was published posthumously. But it is by theChristian Yearthat he won the ear of the religious world. It was a happy thought that dictated the plan of the book, to furnish a meditative religious lyric for each Sunday of the year, and for each saint’s day and festival of the English Church. The subject of each poem is generally suggested by some part of the lessons or the gospel or the epistle for the day. One thing which gives these poems their strangely unique power is the sentiment to which they appeal, and the saintly character of the poet who makes the appeal, illumining more or less every poem.The intimacy with the Bible which is manifest in the pages of theChristian Year; and the unobtrusive felicity with which Biblical sentiments and language are introduced have done much to endear these poems to all Bible readers. “The exactness of the descriptions of Palestine, which Keble had never visited, have been noted, and verified on the spot,” by Dean Stanley. He points to features of the lake of Gennesareth, which were first touched in theChristian Year; and he observes that throughout the book “the Biblical scenery is treated graphically as real scenery, and the Biblical history and poetry as real history and poetry.”As to its style, theChristian Yearis calm and grave in tone, and subdued in colour, as beseems its subjects and sentiments. The contemporary poets whom Keble most admired were Scott, Wordsworth and Southey; and of their influence traces are visible in his diction. Yet he has a style of language and a cadence of his own, which steal into the heart with strangely soothing power. Some of the poems are faultless, after their kind, flowing from the first stage to the last, lucid in thought, vivid in diction, harmonious in their pensive melody. In others there are imperfections in rhythm, conventionalities of language, obscurities or over-subtleties of thought, which mar the reader’s enjoyment. Yet even the most defective poems commonly have, at least, a single verse, expressing some profound thought or tender shade of feeling, for which the sympathetic reader willingly pardons artistic imperfections in the rest.Keble’s life was written by his life-long friend Mr Justice J. T. Coleridge. The following is a complete list of his writings:—1. Works published in Keble’s lifetime:Christian Year(1827);Psalter(1839);Praelectiones Academicae(1844);Lyra Innocentium(1846);Sermons Academical(1848);Argument against Repeal of Marriage Law, andSequel(1857);Eucharistical Adoration(1857);Life of Bishop Wilson(1863);Sermons Occasional and Parochial(1867). 2. Posthumous publications:Village Sermons on the Baptismal Service(1868);Miscellaneous Poems(1869);Letters of Spiritual Counsel(1870);Sermons for the Christian Year, &c.(11 vols., 1875-1880);Occasional Papers and Reviews(1877);Studia Sacra(1877);Outlines of Instruction or Meditation(1880).
Keble also publishedA Metrical Version of the Psalter(1839),Lyra Innocentium(1846), and a volume of poems was published posthumously. But it is by theChristian Yearthat he won the ear of the religious world. It was a happy thought that dictated the plan of the book, to furnish a meditative religious lyric for each Sunday of the year, and for each saint’s day and festival of the English Church. The subject of each poem is generally suggested by some part of the lessons or the gospel or the epistle for the day. One thing which gives these poems their strangely unique power is the sentiment to which they appeal, and the saintly character of the poet who makes the appeal, illumining more or less every poem.
The intimacy with the Bible which is manifest in the pages of theChristian Year; and the unobtrusive felicity with which Biblical sentiments and language are introduced have done much to endear these poems to all Bible readers. “The exactness of the descriptions of Palestine, which Keble had never visited, have been noted, and verified on the spot,” by Dean Stanley. He points to features of the lake of Gennesareth, which were first touched in theChristian Year; and he observes that throughout the book “the Biblical scenery is treated graphically as real scenery, and the Biblical history and poetry as real history and poetry.”
As to its style, theChristian Yearis calm and grave in tone, and subdued in colour, as beseems its subjects and sentiments. The contemporary poets whom Keble most admired were Scott, Wordsworth and Southey; and of their influence traces are visible in his diction. Yet he has a style of language and a cadence of his own, which steal into the heart with strangely soothing power. Some of the poems are faultless, after their kind, flowing from the first stage to the last, lucid in thought, vivid in diction, harmonious in their pensive melody. In others there are imperfections in rhythm, conventionalities of language, obscurities or over-subtleties of thought, which mar the reader’s enjoyment. Yet even the most defective poems commonly have, at least, a single verse, expressing some profound thought or tender shade of feeling, for which the sympathetic reader willingly pardons artistic imperfections in the rest.
Keble’s life was written by his life-long friend Mr Justice J. T. Coleridge. The following is a complete list of his writings:—1. Works published in Keble’s lifetime:Christian Year(1827);Psalter(1839);Praelectiones Academicae(1844);Lyra Innocentium(1846);Sermons Academical(1848);Argument against Repeal of Marriage Law, andSequel(1857);Eucharistical Adoration(1857);Life of Bishop Wilson(1863);Sermons Occasional and Parochial(1867). 2. Posthumous publications:Village Sermons on the Baptismal Service(1868);Miscellaneous Poems(1869);Letters of Spiritual Counsel(1870);Sermons for the Christian Year, &c.(11 vols., 1875-1880);Occasional Papers and Reviews(1877);Studia Sacra(1877);Outlines of Instruction or Meditation(1880).
KECSKEMÉT,a town of Hungary, in the county of Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun, 65 m. S.S.E. of Budapest by rail. Pop. (1900), 56,786. Kecskemét is a poorly built and straggling town, situated in the extensive Kecskemét plain. It contains monasteries belonging to the Piarist and Franciscan orders, a Catholic (founded in 1714), a Calvinistic and a Lutheran school. The manufacture of soap and leather are the principal industries. Besides the raising of cereals, fruit is extensively cultivated in the surrounding district; its apples and apricots are largely exported, large quantities of wine are produced, and cattle-rearing constitutes another great source of revenue. Kecskemét was the birthplace of the Hungarian dramatist József Katona (1792-1830), author of the historical drama,Bánk-Bán(1815).
KEDDAH(from HinduKhedna, to chase), the term, used in India for the enclosure constructed to entrap elephants. In Ceylon the word employed in the same meaning iscorral.
KEDGEREE(Hindostani,khichri), an Indian dish, composed of boiled rice and various highly-flavoured ingredients. Kedgeree is of two kinds, white and yellow. The white is made with grain, onions, ghee (clarified butter), cloves, pepper and salt. Yellow kedgeree includes eggs, and is coloured by turmeric. Kedgeree is a favourite and universal dish in India; among the poorer classes it is frequently made of rice and pulse only, or rice and beans. In European cookery kedgeree is a similar dish usually made with fish.
KEEL, the bottom timber or combination of plates of a ship or boat, extending longitudinally from bow to stern, and supporting the framework (seeShip-building). The origin of the word has been obscured by confusion of two words, the Old Norwegiankjole(cf. Swedishköl) and a Dutch and Germankiel. The first had the meaning of the English “keel,” the other of ship, boat. The modern usage in Dutch and German has approximated to the English. The wordkielis represented in old English bycéol, a word applied to the long war galleys of the Vikings, in which sense “keel” or “keele” is still used by archaeologists. On the Tyne “keel” is the name given to a flat-bottomed vessel used to carry coals to the colliers. There is another word “keel,” meaning to cool, familiar in Shakespeare (Love’s Labour Lost, v. ii. 930), “while greasy Joan doth keel the pot,”i.e.prevents a pot from boiling over by pouring in cold water, &c., stirring or skimming. This is from the Old Englishcélan, to cool, a common Teutonic word, cf. Germankühlen.
KEELEY, MARY ANNE(1806-1899), English actress, was born at Ipswich on the 22nd of November 1805 or 1806. Her maiden name was Goward, her father being a brazier and tinman. After some experience in the provinces, she first appeared on the stage in London on the 2nd of July 1825, in the operaRosina. It was not long before she gave up “singing parts” in favour of the drama proper, where her powers of character-acting could have scope. In June 1829 she married Robert Keeley (1793-1869), an admirable comedian, with whom she had often appeared. Between 1832 and 1842 they acted at Covent Garden, at the Adelphi with Buckstone, at the Olympic with Charles Mathews, and at Drury Lane with Macready. In 1836 they visited America. In 1838 she made her first great success as Nydia, the blind girl, in a dramatized version of Bulwer Lytton’sThe Last Days of Pompeii, and followed this with an equally striking impersonation of Smike inNicholas Nickleby. In 1839 came her decisive triumph with her picturesque and spirited acting as the hero of a play founded upon Harrison Ainsworth’sJack Sheppard. So dangerous was considered the popularity of the play, with its glorification of the prison-breaking felon, that the lord chamberlain ultimately forbade the performance of any piece upon the subject. It is perhaps mainly as Jack Sheppard that Mrs Keeley lived in the memory of playgoers, despite her long subsequent career in plays more worthy of her remarkable gifts. Under Macready’s management she played Nerissa inThe Merchant of Venice, and Audrey inAs You Like It. She managed the Lyceum with her husband from 1844 to 1847; acted with Webster and Kean at the Haymarket; returned for five years to the Adelphi; and made her last regular public appearance at the Lyceum in 1859. A public reception was given her at this theatre on her 90th birthday. She died on the 12th of March 1899.
See Walter Goodman,The Keeleys on the Stage and off(London, 1895).
See Walter Goodman,The Keeleys on the Stage and off(London, 1895).
KEELING ISLANDS(often calledCocosandCocos-Keeling Islands), a group of coral islands in the Indian Ocean, between 12° 4′ and 12° 13′ S., and 96° 49′-57′ E., but including a smaller island in 11° 50′ N. and 96° 50′ E. The group furnished Charles Darwin with the typical example of an atoll or lagoon island. There are altogether twenty-three small islands, 9½ m. being the greatest width of the whole atoll. The lagoon is very shallow and the passages between many of the islands are fordable on foot. An opening on the northern side of the reef permits the entrance of vessels into the northern part of the lagoon, which forms a good harbour known as Port Refuge or Port Albion. The coco-nut (as the name Cocos Islands indicates) is the characteristic product and is cultivated on all the islands. The flora is scanty in species. One of the commonest living creatures is a monstrous crab which lives on the coco-nuts; and in some places also there are great colonies of the pomegranate crab. The group was visited by Dr H. O. Forbes in 1878, and later, at the expense of Sir John Murray, by Dr Guppy, Mr Ridley and Dr Andrews. The object of their visits was the investigation of the fauna and flora of the atoll, more especially of the formation of the coral reefs. Dr Guppy was fortunate in reaching North Keeling Island, where a landing is only possible during the calmest weather. The island he found to be about a mile long, with a shallow enclosed lagoon, less than 3 ft. deep at ordinary low water, with a single opening on its east or weather side. A dense vegetation of iron-wood (Cordia) and other trees and shrubs, together with a forest of coco-nut palms, covers its surface. It is tenanted by myriads of sea-fowl, frigate-birds, boobies, and terns (Gygis candida), which find here an excellent nesting-place, for the island is uninhabited, and is visited only once or twice a year. The excrement from this large colony has changed the carbonate of lime in the soil and the coral nodules on the surface into phosphates, to the extent in some cases of 60-70%, thus forming a valuable deposit, beneficial to the vegetation of the island itself and promising commercial value. The lagoon is slowly filling up and becoming cultivable land, but the rate of recovery from the sea has been specially marked since the eruption of Krakatoa, the pumice from which was washed on to it in enormous quantity, so that the lagoon advanced its shores from 20 to 30 yards. Forbes’s and Guppy’s investigations go to show that, contrary to Darwin’s belief, there is no evidence of upheaval or of subsidence in either of the Keeling groups.
The atoll has an exceedingly healthy climate, and might well be used as a sanatorium for phthisical patients, the temperature never reaching extremes. The highest annual reading of the thermometer hardly ever exceeds 89° F. or falls beneath 70°. The mean temperature for the year is 78.5° F., and as the rainfall rarely exceeds 40 in. the atmosphere never becomes unpleasantly moist. The south-east trade blows almost ceaselessly for ten months of the year. Terrific storms sometimes break over the island; and it has been more than once visited by earthquakes. A profitable trade is done in coco-nuts, but there are few other exports. The imports are almost entirely foodstuffs and other necessaries for the inhabitants, who form a patriarchal colony under a private proprietor.
The islands were discovered in 1609 by Captain William Keeling on his voyage from Batavia to the Cape. In 1823 Alexander Hare, an English adventurer, settled on the southernmost island with a number of slaves. Some two or three years after, a Scotchman, J. Ross, who had commanded a brig during the English occupation of Java, settled with his family (who continued in the ownership) on Direction Island, and his little colony was soon strengthened by Hare’s runaway slaves. The Dutch Government had in an informal way claimed the possession of the islands since 1829; but they refused to allow Ross to hoist the Dutch flag, and accordingly the group was taken under British protection in 1856. In 1878 it was attached to the government of Ceylon, and in 1882 placed under the authority of the governor of the Straits Settlements. The ownership and superintendency continued in the Ross family, of whom George Clunies Ross died in 1910, and was succeeded by his son Sydney.
See C. Darwin,Journal of the Voyage of the “Beagle,”andGeological Observations on Coral Reefs; also Henry O. Forbes,A Naturalist’s Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago(London, 1884); H. B. Guppy, “The Cocos-Keeling Islands,”Scottish Geographical Magazine(vol. v., 1889).
See C. Darwin,Journal of the Voyage of the “Beagle,”andGeological Observations on Coral Reefs; also Henry O. Forbes,A Naturalist’s Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago(London, 1884); H. B. Guppy, “The Cocos-Keeling Islands,”Scottish Geographical Magazine(vol. v., 1889).
KEEL-MOULDING,in architecture, a round on which there is a small fillet, somewhat like the keel of a ship. It is common in the Early English and Decorated styles.