20 MAY 1949, Page 34

Keats, Shelley and Rome. Compiled by Neville Rogers. (Christopher Johnson.

7s. 6d.) I'm royalties from the sale of this attractive little miscellany of seventy-five pages are to be given to the Keats-Shelley Memorial in Rome, which alone is sufficient reason for buying it. But the book is also worth acquiring for its own sake, as a footnote to larger studies. Mr. Neville Rogers re-tells the immortal story of Keats' and Shelley's last years ; Miss Dorothy Hewlett and Mr. Edmund Btunden describe the growth of the poets' posthumous fame ; and the Italian lady who is the curator of the house in the Piazza di Spagna shows how it came to life again after the departure of the Germans in x944. Ten illustrations include the death-mask of Keats,

from a cast recently discovered, and an unpublished sketch of him by Severn.