Mellow fruitfulness

It is utterly heartless of me, and I do love the poems in all their over-the-top glory (and the letters are indispensable - I think my favorite critical book about Keats is Christopher Ricks' excellent Keats and Embarrassment), but one sentence near the end of Charles McGrath's slightly reverential review of Stanley Plumly's Posthumous Keats (funny pair of Amazon reviews!) rather made me laugh (run-on sentence alert, this is the hazard of stopping to paste in links!):

At the end, barely able to lift himself from bed, he was subsisting, on doctor’s orders, on a single anchovy.

I think the anchovy must have had more dignity in the Romantic period than it has now. I am fond of anchovies myself, in all of their common incarnations, but they are not to everyone's taste...