When Milton met Galileo

The most recent account of this meeting is given in Joe Moshenska’s excellent book Making Darkness Light: the lives of John Milton.

In 1638, in a collision of such giants in their own worlds that their meeting is almost too good to be true, the young John Milton met Galileo at his villa in the hills outside Florence. 

Galileo, now in his seventies, had been living under house arrest since his conviction for heresy in 1633. His astronomical studies had eventually gone too far for the church hierarchy despite his best attempts for many years to avoid controversy. He was found to be sufficiently suspect of heresy in promoting the Copernican view that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe, which was well-known as a theory by that time but not one that the church could officially countenance. He lived out his remaining days at his villa, receiving visitors and writing his book The Two New Sciences which summarised some of his earlier work. By the time Milton visited, he had recently gone blind and was suffering from a hernia, and he died in 1642. 

The only account we have of this meeting is Milton’s own. He wrote that he had “found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought”. It’s a passing reference in his book Areopagitica, which was a defence of free speech – of the “liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience” - published in 1644. His intention was to use Galileo as an example of someone speaking out against authority, in the context of his argument that “Truth was never put to the worse in a free and open encounter.” 

Because this account was inserted to illustrate an argument, and because there is no direct evidence of it, some scholars have doubted it took place, and perhaps the church would have tried to prevent Galileo from meeting a foreigner and a Protestant.

I think we can assume that they did meet. But what was Milton doing there?

This was on Milton’s only foreign tour, a visit to Italy via France in 1638-39. Aged 29 and with considerable reading under his belt, as well as mastery of the Italian language, Milton was an earnest academic in search of a purpose, and it was during this trip that his idea of writing an English epic poem began to crystalise. No doubt he was deeply influenced by the introductions he gained to many learned people and by his exposure to the southern European (and Catholic) ebullience of art and architecture. As a convinced Protestant, Milton was of course suspicious of the richness of the Catholic church, which he would later increasingly denounce, but he seems to have enjoyed his time in Italy, including in Rome itself, relishing an injection of intellectual and artistic novelty.

Galileo actually makes an appearance in Milton’s cosmic imagining of heaven, earth and hell in Paradise Lost. We see through the eyes of the angel Raphael: “As when by night the glass / Of Galileo, less assured, observes / Imagined lands and regions in the Moon”. Satan’s shield “Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose orb / Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views”. And there’s a reference elsewhere to an astronomer looking “through his glazed optic tube”. [PL 5.261, 1.287, 3.588]

Milton and Galileo would certainly have valued their conversation. While Milton was not yet famous, word was going round about him in Italy and he was well-known enough to pique Galileo’s interest. This was not just a passing encounter, but an arranged meeting that they would have anticipated keenly. Maybe Milton was shown and tried out Galileo’s telescope, and surely Milton would have asked about his observations, but cautiously as they touched on theological matters. And given that they had both grown up in musical households, they might have shared an enthusiasm for music. But Moshenska speculates that above all they might well have discussed poetry. Galileo was known as an excellent writer of prose and poetry himself. He had strong views on the relative merits of Ariosto and Tasso, the two preeminent Italian poets after Dante, and Milton was familiar with and took inspiration from all three. 

Evidently Milton thought back to this encounter in later life, when he wrote Galileo into his great epic poem. And he may have imagined again the Tuscan sun on his back when he too was imprisoned for getting on the wrong side of the establishment, and when, by 1652, he had lost his own sight, “In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude” [PL 7.27-28].

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References
https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2017/08/25/milton-galileo-affinities-art-science/
https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/milton-visiting-galileo-when-a-prisoner-of-the-inquisition-125949

See also: 

When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

When James met Eliot

When Keats met Wordsworth

When Shaw met Kiping

When Lawrence of Arabia met Joseph Conrad

Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), 'Lawrence of Arabia', met Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) on one occasion, and they seem to have got on well. It was in the warm summer of 1920, on Sunday 18th July, at the home of the novelist Hugh Walpole.

And, thanks to Walpole’s diary, we have a glimpse of the meeting. 

Aged 31, Lawrence was in the middle of re-writing his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, having lost the manuscript the year before. It wouldn’t be published until after he died. The exploits for which he was famous were over, and he was serving as an advisor to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office – a desk job he quickly got bored with. 

Lawrence had recently become a household name as a result of the romantic dramatization of his role in the Arab revolt, in a theatre show first produced the year before by the impresario Lowell Thomas, who popularised his role. The show had just been relaunched, in early 1920, with Lawrence in a more prominent role than in the original production. He was later to regret it, but he willingly took part in promoting the show, posing for many photographs. He was in a sense the swashbuckling hero of jingoistic magazines of the time – he describes himself as a matinée idol. 

Now, Lawrence was concerned to finish his book, wondering if his political ambitions for the Arabs he represented at the 1919 peace conference were going to come to anything. 

The 64-year-old Conrad, suffering from rheumatism or gout, and prone to depression, was also in retrospective mood. He was looking back over his work, publishing some letters and notes on his books at around that time, and only slowly beginning another book. With an eye on his legacy, he harboured hopes of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but this never came about. 

And it’s clear from Conrad’s letters of the time that he was not enjoying writing – he wrote very little in 1920 and was distracted by his wife Jessie being ill and his sons struggling to get on in life. He wrote that he felt “uncertain and directionless, like a ship whose crew has gone to land leaving all her sails in disarray”. 

Each were at the peak of the fame they would experience in their lifetimes, and they perhaps shared a sense that this was passing: Lawrence in growing disillusion, and Conrad knowing that his best years were behind him. 

Here is Walpole’s diary entry. 

“Conrad very cheerful. Really has started the Napoleon novel. Showed me some of the second chapter and I was surprised to see how many foreign phrases that were in this first draft. I am thus the first person in the world, after his typist, to meet Cosmo and Henrietta. When I criticised Mrs Travers a little, he said: “Of course, mon cher, it is not very good. I did my best work long ago.” Cunningham Graham and Lawrence the Arab man came down. The latter mild, small, modest, with fine eyes. Said the legend about him all untrue. Talked of printing and the Crusades.” 

And there are two more glimpses of the encounter. One is mentioned in a letter by the architect Sir Herbert Baker who knew Lawrence at around this time, who said that “when meeting Conrad he probed him on the methods of his craft; Conrad admitting but little conscious design. Lawrence would say that he himself had over-studied his own craftsmanship.” 

The other is a description of Conrad by Lawrence years later, in 1935, in a letter to the artist Bruce Rogers: “What I shall always remember is his lame walk, with the stick to help him, and that sudden upturning of the lined face, with its eager eyes under their membrane of eyelid. They drooped over the eye-socket and the sun shone red through them, as we walked up and down the garden.” 

How curious that each man’s eyes are remarked on. 

Of course they talked about writing, but perhaps while walking up and down the garden and not in Walpole’s hearing. Lawrence may have mentioned his admiration for The Mirror of the Sea, which he told people was his favourite Conrad book, on a par with Moby Dick. He received a signed copy from Conrad two years later. And Conrad may have mentioned his current project, Suspense, which is the Napoleon novel Walpole referred to. It was never finished, though. Instead, Conrad was soon working on what would be his final novel, The Rover. This is a story about age and retirement, with obvious autobiographical ideas in the tale of a retired sailor who questions his own purpose before being dragged into one last adventure. 

Whatever else they might have discussed, beyond “printing and the Crusades”, they seem to have found each other good company. 

And they did have some things in common. They both had an interest in the intelligence services, for example. Laurence had served in this capacity in the War, while of course Conrad had explored the subject in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. And the sort of ambiguous life that Lawrence had lived, in two cultures, with his increasing sympathy with the ‘native’ culture, is exactly the topic of The Heart of Darkness.

In the months following the encounter, Lawrence abandoned his efforts on behalf of the Arabs in the post-wat settlement, and he seems to have experienced a kind of mental breakdown, perhaps out of frustration or guilt. His life turned a corner soon after, when he joined the RAF under an assumed name, trying to escape his own fame. 

In his memoir of his father, written in 1970, Conrad’s son Borys describes a man of old-fashioned values who discouraged displays of emotion in his family. Perhaps he was often reticent with visitors, especially when feeling as unsettled as he did around the time that Lawrence visited. Yet, as we read in Walpole’s diary, it was a good day: he was “very cheerful”. He enjoyed the meeting. 

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The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett (London: Cape, 1938) 

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 7, 1920–1922 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/247648/pdf 

Joseph Conrad and T E Lawrence, Ton Hoenselaars and Gene M. Moore, Conradiana Vol. 27, 1 (Spring 1995) 

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-1-349-09387-8_54.pdf

See also: 

When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

When James met Eliot

When Keats met Wordsworth

When Shaw met Kiping

When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

In 1773, while on his tour of the Hebrides, Samuel Johnson met the legendary Flora McDonald. And while he stayed in her house he slept in the bed that Charles Edward Stuart, 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' (or the Young Pretender) had used while on the run after the Battle of Culloden. 

Johnson's itinerary with Boswell was dictated by where they could stay - they hopped between the houses of the local gentry, who were invariably hospitable, and presumably sometimes curious to meet the famous Dr Johnson. So, for example, they were unable to visit the island of Muck because, although “this island well deserved to be seen, the Lairds’s absence afforded us no opportunity “. However, at Sky, they were well looked after. 

"We came to Kingsborough, a place distinguished by that name, because the King lodged here when he landed at Port Re. We were entertained with the usual hospitality by Mr. Macdonald and his lady, Flora Macdonald, a name that will be mentioned in history, courage and fidelity be virtues, with honour. She is a woman of middle stature, soft features, gentle manners, and elegant presence." 

It's a succinct account of the woman who had become famous after helping Charles Edward Stuart to escape capture, and Johnson is right that her name would be "mentioned in history": then she was well-known, but a century later she was elevated to heroic status by the Victorians. 

In a letter to Mrs Thrale a little time later, Johnson repeats his favourable impression of Flora. He says she was: "of a pleasing person and elegant behaviour. She told me that she thought herself honoured by my visit; and I am sure that whatever regard she bestowed on me was liberally repaid." 

To have only this much about their meeting would be only tantalising. But thankfully we also have Boswell's account. As usual, he is more gossipy in his description of the encounter, at the house of the "gallant highlander" Alan Macdonald. 

"There was a comfortable parlour with a good fire, and a dram went round. By and by supper was served, at which there appeared the lady of the house, the celebrated Miss Flora Macdonald. She is a little woman, of a genteel appearance, and uncommonly mild and well-bred. To see Dr Samuel Johnson, the great champion of the English Tories, salute Miss Flora Macdonald in the isle of Sky, was a striking sight; for although somewhat congenial in their notions, it was very improbable that they should meet here." 

Johnson retired early (though presumably after Flora had done so) and slept in the same bed that the Young Pretender had slept in nearly 30 years before. He was in a mood that Boswell describes as "quiescent". 

Were they "congenial in their notions"? It seems so. There was some banter between them, as Flora explained that Johnson had been described to her as a "young buck", which he enjoyed hearing. At any rate, Johnson was impressed by the significance of the meeting, because, as Boswell tells us, "upon our table in the room I found in the morning a slip of paper, on which Dr Johnson had written with his pencil these words: 'Quantum cedat virtutibus aurum' ('with virtue weighted, what worthless trash is gold!') - presumably a reference to Flora's choice of allegiance over the financial reward of giving up the fleeing Jacobite. 

So Flora lived up to Johnson's expectations, his Tory political convictions leading him to a certain sympathy with Jacobites as "true Britons", unlike the hated Whigs. (Although Flora had not been a Jacobite rebel, she always said, rather someone who had simply helped Charles out of compassion.) 

In the morning, there was the opportunity for more relaxed conversation before the travellers moved on, and in fact Flora gave Johnson an account of the famous escapade. Boswell says that "perceiving Dr Johnson's curiosity, though he had delicacy enough not to question her, [she] very obligingly entertained him with a recital of the particulars that she herself knew of that escape" and Johnson "listened to her with placid attention". 

The travellers departed after breakfast, taking leave of their hostess and escorted onwards by Macdonald for a few miles. Whatever their thoughts about the encounter at the time, it inspired Boswell to digress at length in his memoir about the rights and wrongs of the Jacobite cause. 

Alan and Flora were soon to leave for a new life in America, as part of what Johnson described earlier in his journal as "this epidemical fury of emigration". They had to return after the venture failed and Flora died in 1790, aged 68. 

Johnson and Flora were brought together again after death. A monument to her was erected at her grave in Kilmuir on Sky, and much later the epitaph was added using Johnson's own words: 'Her name will be mentioned in history and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour'.

See also:

When James met Eliot

When Keats met Wordsworth

When Shaw met Kiping

When James met Eliot

 

For Henry James - a great (though sometimes reluctant) admirer of George Eliot - visiting her was an important highlight of his European tours in 1869 and 1878. 

She was already revered for her novels (even before Middlemarch was published in 1871-72 she was immensely famous), while he was an aspiring writer with little yet published. Writing about Eliot in 1885, James described her as a women "before whom, at middle age, all the culture of the world unrolled itself, and towards whom fame and fortune... pressed with rapidity". 

But while James’ visits made such an impression on him that he was still talking about Eliot on his deathbed, there's no evidence that she took much notice of him. 

James met Eliot on three occasions, as far as we know. Two were at her secluded house near Regent's Park, The Priory, where she lived with her life partner, George Henry Lewes. Because of their unconventional living arrangements (not being married), there was a frisson of scandal about the place, which also meant that invitations were issued with some diplomacy. 

These visits were precious moments for those who were granted an audience. James paid Eliot backhanded compliments in his detailed accounts of his visits. He was clearly torn between hero worship and his high opinion of himself. He seems to have resented her influence. 

James gossiped eagerly about the first meeting, on 9th May 1869, in a letter home the following day. As he explained, "she is much hedged about with sanctity and a stranger can go only under cover of a received friend". This was the art critic Charles Eliot Norton. "I was immensely impressed, interested & pleased" he wrote, noting she has "a broad hint of a great underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride & power". But he describes her in an enthusiastic series of contrasts, as if he resents the hero worship welling within him. 

Eliot, he says, is "magnificently ugly", yet "in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty" that makes him "fall in love" with her: "behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking." She has "a great feminine dignity & character in these massively plain features, a hundred conflicting shades of consciousness & simpleness — shyness & frankness — graciousness & remote indifference." And "her manner is extremely good tho’ rather too intense". 

In return, we know almost nothing of what Eliot thought of him. Although we know she did read The Europeans at least, in all of her correspondence there is just one reference to him. In 1880, while on honeymoon with John Cross (Lewes had died two years previously) , she noted "a graceful letter of congratulation from Mr Henry James". 

James' visit was actually also rather dramatic. In his letter home he explains that "Mr Lewes’s second son [Thornie], an extremely pleasant looking young fellow of about twenty four, lay on the drawing-room floor, writhing in agony from an attack of pain in the spine to which he is subject. We of course beat a hasty retreat, in time to have seen G. H. Lewes come in himself in all his ugliness, with a dose of morphine from the chemist’s." 

Thornie had just arrived home the day before. Eliot wrote in her journal: "Poor Thornie arrived from Natal, sadly wasted by suffering" but she says nothing about the day of James's visit. No doubt she and Lewes were much more preoccupied with Thornie than their probably inconvenient visitors.

[Indebted to this article by Rosemary Ashton]

Also: When Keats met Wordsworth  |  When Shaw met Kipling

Reflections on organising online concerts during lockdown

The Swan Lake Bath Ballet brought it home - how lockdown, the closure of performing spaces and loss of live audience contact has been so devastating to our cultural life, that artists have been forced into entirely unforeseen outlets for their creativity. Here was something beautiful that simply wouldn't have existed in any other circumstances. 

This month, indoor live performances were supposed to resume, under tight restrictions, but this has been postponed. Still, the first major music venues are hoping to stage concerts soon - including Snape Maltings and Wigmore Hall. With reduced audiences and limited duration, it's a long way from normal, but it's a start and it's hopeful.

And it's being watched anxiously by the thousands of musicians whose working lives have been convulsed. Hopefully, they will benefit from the Government's £1.57bn arts package, indirectly at least. In the meantime, let's not forget to encourage all those who have picked themselves up and found an innovative responses, especially if they don't have a big organisation behind them.

For me, running a small and entirely self-funding chamber music series, the difficulties faced by professional music venues are unimaginable. I don't rely on external income and don't have bills to pay. But I've been able to facilitate a little of this innovation, and learnt a few lessons along the way - primarily, I've learnt that there's a huge value in doing something live, even if it can be rather scary. 

Following the example of performers who turned their homes into venues for online concerts, I invited some local professional musicians to present a short recital over a video conference (Zoom webinar), which I would promote as part of a little series. Because of the vaguaries of internet quality and the level of technology risk we were prepared to accept, I decided that the performances would be recorded in advance and also hosted on Vimeo for reliability, but the event was still live on Zoom, with a conversation between me and the performers to introduce the music, and the opportunity for the audience to type in comments and to donate.  

Zoom is quite well designed for this, and it's nowadays a familiar tool for most of our audience, but critically it required use of one of Zoom's paid-for accounts to give presenters an active role separate from the audience. We used the 'pro' account, which allows up to 100 participants - so you can see that our ambitions are modest.

Still, the response has been overwhelming. Admittedly, there haven't been lots of people watching: our four events were watched by dozens of people not hundreds, and views of the recordings number a few hundred. But people have been so generous and enthusiastic to see a local initiative up and running, while the players have also been cheered on by friends and family, pleased to see them back performing. 

For a properly professional version of what I've been doing, take a look at (and do support) Stage-Hub.

Is this the way forward now? When our little series returns to the church that gives it its name, we could broadcast from there instead of having a live audience - or as well as having a socially-distanced one. It's hardly a new idea, as many venues have streamed concerts online before this crisis, but it could easily become the norm.

And of course that allows for people to attend from all over the world. Even we had viewers from America, Italy and South Korea.

It's given me a lot of satisfaction to dabble in concert promotion and in new ways of doing things through necessity. I'm enormously impressed by the tenacity and enthusiasm of the performers, who have had to overcome a number of technological difficulties. Our audience has generously responded to an invitaton to donate. It's been a fun project for us together.

But it is very, very far from a sustainable model for earning a living.

Sorry not sorry

Dominic Cummings refusing to apologise

Do people apologise less than they used to? 

Recently, the King of Belgium expressed "deepest regrets" for his country's colonial abuses. And his brother, Prince Laurent, said that he "always apologises" to African heads of state when they meet.  

This is good and meaningful. The more so, I feel, because saying sorry is rather going out of fashion. No matter how many unfulfilled promises and u-turns are made by governments, they never apologise. Formerly, wouldn't there have been more embarrassment about errors? Now they just ignore them and hope they will go away - which, unfortunately, is what seems to happen. 

As the UK started to emerge from lockdown in July, Boris Johnson was accused of "cowardly" language when saying that care homes "didn't really follow the procedures" and shifting blame onto the sector. The next day, no-one was apologising. Instead they claimed he meant something different, which journalists at the briefing found hard to swallow. And when challenged further, the spokesperson just refused to answer the question and kept on repeating the agreed explanation. Or lie. 

I suppose that's because there is no longer any pretence at there being a single official record of anything. And indeed Johnson's team was accused of rewriting history by repeatedly claiming he had said something he hadn't. 

President Trump is currently reckoned to tell 23 lies every day  (up from 12 last year), but that doesn't seem to matter because enough people are happy with one of the myriad alternative versions of reality that they can inhabit, populated by "alternative facts". Wouldn't it be refreshing to hear just sometimes a nod in the direction of regret? 

I'm grateful to my MP for replying to my complaint about Dominic Cummings' notorious trip to Durham. He was inclined to give Cummings the benefit of the doubt, but he thought he should nonetheless have apologised. Quite! Yes indeed he should. But that would, I suppose, not be his way, which is to be uncompromising. For those of us who expect and like compromise, his obstinacy afterwards was even worse than the infringement itself. 

Actually, King Philippe's "regrets" were noted to fall short of a proper apology, and that's no doubt because there's an immediate implication that reparations would be made. At a personal level as well, of course, an apology starts to look a bit thin if you're not prepared to back it up with action. 

And there's a technique to being sorry in Western culture, thanks to centuries of intellectualising in Christianity, which has apology and forgiveness at its heart. It provides four useful steps: being genuinely sorry and wanting to do better (contrition), fully expressing that regret (confession), being released (absolution) and making up for it (satisfaction or penance). 

Now it seems to me that these really are useful, because they make you properly consider whether you really are sorry for something, and how you're going to repair the relationship with whoever you may have injured. 

I know it's a typical British habit to apologise first and establish any blame afterwards. It's just polite - although it's often passive-aggressive ("I'm saying sorry but really it's your fault so you'd better say sorry, too"). A recent poll found that British people apologise eight times a day. 

But the older I get (and, no doubt, the stuffier) the more often I find a bit of a dislocation here. I'm not saying that people are meaner or less polite. That British apology reflex is still there, but not so much in work situations. It seems a deliberate behaviour change. 

There's a positive side to this. Maybe we shouldn't go round being sorry all the time. For example, studies have shown that women are more inclined than men to apologise and to expect apologies, but that this can be to their disadvantage because it signifies not just politeness but deference. And in a professional environment that can be tactically sensible or not, depending on the situation. 

This article puts it nicely, with a reference to a study in the journal of applied social psychology. The article concludes that apologies make most impact when they're unexpected, and the most unexpected and therefore most effective apology would be from a senior to a junior, and from a male to a female within a workplace. How concisely does that capture our whole history of the male-dominated workplace! No wonder young women might be encouraged to resist unnecessary apologies, even never to apologise. 

But I'm not 100% convinced by the idea in this Ted Talk that we can generally say "thank you" instead. 

In the end, I suppose I just have a lower 'apology threshold'. I do think that expressing regret for things is a good and necessary thing for us to do. It's not just for the benefit of the recipient. It might not be intended for their benefit at all. Understanding responsibility for an error and wishing to do better next time is something we teach our children as soon as they learn they find themselves making deliberate choices. 

I dare say anthropologists can explain that all societies involve a measure of expected apology as part of the social glue of justice. It’s about confirming, re-establishing a common set of values, and in these times we need that more than ever.

When Keats met Wordsworth

John Keats idolised William Wordsworth before he met him. But then disillusion set in.

It was December 1817. Keats, aged 22, was a promising young poet who had just seen his poetry in publication for the first time and was in the middle of writing Endymion, which came out the following year. Wordsworth was well-established by then, and Keats admired him, emulating his style in his first published poem, 'To Solitude' (1816), speaking of:

...the sweet converse of an innocent mind
Whose words are images of thoughts refin'd

And Wordsworth is one of the three heroes in Keats’s sonnet “Great Spirits Now on Earth Are Sojourning”, written and sent to the artist Robert Haydon in November 1816.

He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake,
Who on Helvellyn’s summit, wide awake,
Catches his freshness from Archangel’s wing;

Their first meeting was arranged by Haydon, in December 1817, who described it as follows in a letter to a friend:

"When Wordsworth came to Town, I brought Keats to him, by his Wordsworth’s desire - Keats expressed to me as we walked to Queen Anne St East where Mr Monkhouse lodged, the greatest, the purest, the most unalloyed pleasure at the prospect. Wordsworth received him kindly, & after a few minutes, Wordsworth asked him what he had been lately doing. I said he has just finished an exquisite ode to Pan - and as he had not a copy I begged Keats to repeat it - which he did in his usual half chant, (most touching) walking up & down the room - when he had done I felt really, as if I had heard a young Apollo - Wordsworth drily said “a very pretty piece of Paganism” - This was unfeeling, & unworthy of his high Genius to a young Whorshipper like Keats - & Keats felt it deeply - so that if Keats has said any thing severe about our Friend; it was because he was wounded - and though he dined with Wordsworth after at my table -- he never forgave him."

One of these further meetings with Wordsworth gets a mention in a letter to Keats's brothers George and Tom a few weeks later (5 January 1818). Keats also refers to the dinner at Haydon's, but there is little sign of enthusiasm for the older poet.

"This day I promised to dine with Wordsworth and the weather is so bad that I am undecided for he lives at Mortimer Street. i had an invitation to meet him at Kingstons - but not liking that place i sent my excus... On Saturday I called on Wordsworth before he went to Kingston's and was surprised to find him with a stiff collar. I saw his spouse and I think his daughter - I forget whether I had written my last before my Sunday evening at Haydon's - no I did not or I should have told you of a young man you met at Paris at Scott's of the name of Richer [Joseph Ricthie] I think - he is going to Fezan in Africa there to proceed if possible like Mungo Park - he was very polite to me and enquired very particularly after you - then there was Wordsworth, Lamb, Monkhouse, Landeer, Kingston and your humble servant. Lamb got tipsey and blew up Kingston..."

Then in a letter to Benjamin Bailey, 23 January 1818, Keats writes "I have seen a great deal of Wordsworth" without providing any further details - so perhaps he didn't find the meetings very inspiring. And then writing to the brothers again in February, he says: "I am sorry that Wordsworth has left a bad impression wherever he visited in Town - by his egotism, vanity and bigotry - yet he is a great poet if not a philosopher."

There's also a missed meeting to record. Later that year, Keats toured the Lakes, writing to his brother Tom (25-27 June) that "Lord Wordsworth, instead of being in retirement, has himself and his house full in the thick of fashionable visitors quite convenient to be pointed at all the summer long."

Yet he was not at home for Keats on this occasion.

"We slept at Ambleside not above two miles from Rydal the residence of Wordsworth... We ate a monstrous breakfast on our return and after it proceeded to Wordsworth's. He was not at home nor was any member of his family. I was much disappointed. I wrote a note for him and stuck it up over what I knew must be Miss Wordsworth's portrait and set forth again." (Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 27-28 June 1818)

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See also: http://johnkeats.uvic.ca/resources/DesperatelySeekingColeridge.pdf for an account of the only meeting between Keats and Coleridge 

References
https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2014/10/25/wordsworth-and-keats/#!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2106314.The_Immortal_Dinner
http://keats-poems.com/letters/