Keats’ letters are treasures – he is every bit as fine a correspondent as he is a poet.  Here he chides a friend for visually attractive but sprawlingly illegible hand-writing.

‘You must improve in your penmanship; your writing is like the speaking of a child of three years old, very understandable to its father but to no one else. The worst is it looks well – no that is not the worst – the worst is, it is worse than Bailey’s.’

Source: 4 March 1820, John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford World Classics, 2002/2009), p. 339

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