20 JUNE 1952, Page 18

Keats in Hampstead

SIR,—Mr. Nicolson writes of the terrible haemorrhage which befell Keats on February 3rd, 1820. But was it so ? Nothing in Keatsian literature is more familiar than Charles Armitage Brown's account of that night—how Keats, getting into bed in a high fever, coughed slightly and'then asked for the candle to examine a single spot of blood on the sheet, which his medically-trained eye knew for his death- warrant. A surgeon bled him, but there was no other effusion of blood.