reveries of childhood. The house was tastefully filled
with antique furniture, a few prints adorned the walls, and
a curtain guarded from flies and profanation, Gains-
borough's portrait of its eccentric mistress. Here wearily
passed the days of the child-poet; he was allowed no
playmates ; he experienced no sympathy ; he was debarred
from the exercises natural to his age, as no speck of dirt
was ever allowed to soil his immaculate attire. He slept with
his aunt, who was a late riser, and morning after morning
had he to lie in painful tranquillity, fearing lest he might
disturb her by some involuntary motion ; occupied in tracing
fanciful combinations in the folds of the curtains, and
watching the countless motes dancing in the sunbeams
that crept through the chinks of the shutters.
The wife of Francis Newberry, a son of Goldsmith's
publishing patron, was a friend of Miss Tyler's, and she
presented the nephew with twenty of those famous juvenile
works, so popular, before it was the custom to torture the
minds of children with elementary treatises on statics and
political economy. To the eager perusal of these treasures
Southey ascribed much of his early predilection for books.
He was frequently taken to the theatre, for which amuse-
ment Miss Tyler had a strong partiality, and would con-
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ROBERT SOUTH EY. 349
verse with the actors who visited her house. He even
caught the dramatic tone of conversation, and one
Sunday on his return from church received a grave
rebuke, for having observed that there had been a very
frill house that morning.
In his sixth year he was sent to a school at
Bristol, kept by one Foot, a Baptist, who had sunk into
Arianism, a vindictive and stem divine, who died after
he had been there twelve months, and was succeeded by a
Socinian. He was then removed to Corston, about nine
miles from Bristol ; this school was abruptly dissolved, and
young Southey was sent to live with his grandmother at
Bedminster, with whom Miss Tyler was then domes-
ticated.
He was next placed under a Welshman named Williams,
at Bristol, from whom he learnt but little, but where he
spent the pleasantest of his school days. Williams, who
was proud of his elocution, once asked his pupil scornfully
who taught him to read. " My aunt," replied Southey,
"Then give my compliments to your aunt," said the
master, " and tell her that my old horse that has been
dead twenty years could have taught you as well." Southey
innocently delivered the message verbatim, and was as-
tonished at the violent reception it met with. He was
next placed under the superintendence of Lewis, a clergy-
man at Bristol, where Miss Tyler was then residing. This
succession of teachers must, according to conventional
notions of education, have been most injurious. An ordi-
nary boy would have been as ignorant at the end of such
a peregrination as at the beginning. But it was advan-
tageous rather than hurtful to an inquisitive mind like
Southey's. The frequent change of scene enlarged his
ideas, and he had already commenced that system of
unconscious self-culture, which is the principal, probably
the only, effective education of superior minds. Newberry^s
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*350 ROBERT SOXn-HEY.
publications had awakened a taste for reading, which he
gratified by all available means. Beaumont and Fletcher
were read through before he was eight years old ; he had
also made himself familiar with some of the plays of Shake-
speare, and the discrepancy between them, and the history
of the times they treated of, was a grievous puzzle to him.
During one of his holidays, a friend made him a present
of Hoole's translation of " Tasso." The book touched a
nerve in his organization that had till then been dormant,
and the remembrance of the gratification its pages afforded,
endured through all his after life. The book was carefully
preserved. "Forty years," said he, writing in 1823,
" have tarnished the gilding upon its back, but they have
not eflfaced my remembrance of the joy with which I
received it, and the delight I found in its perusal.^* Tasso,
Ariosto, Spenser, Mickle's " Lusiad," Pope's " Homer,*'
Josephus, Sidney's " Arcadia," and Rowley were diligently
read. His father's library was limited, a small cupboard
held all his books and his wine-glasses ; but during the
holidays, the boy had the run of a circulating library in
the town comprising a few hundred volumes, and among
them he revelled.
He had projected and commenced both tragedies and
epic poems, before he was ten years of age, and was sur-
prised that his schoolfellows should experience any diffi-
culty in providing appropriate dialogue if he furnished the
plot and characters. " It is the easiest thing in the world,"
said he, " to write a play, for you know you have only to
think what you would say if you were in the place of the
characters, and to make them say it." He was sensitive,
however, of his fame, and some of his pieces having been
discovered and read at his aunt's, he invented a cypher;
but becoming unable to solve his own hieroglyphics, burnt
his manuscripts in vexation.
In February, 1788, he went to Westminster, but not
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ROBERT SOUTHEY. 351
having been previously drilled in Latin verse-maMng, he
never distinguished himself at the school. While there, a
paper was started called "The Flagellant/' In conse-
quence of an attack on corporal punishment, in the ninth
number, furnished by Southey, written m a strain of
jocularity rather than invective. Dr. Vincent, the head
master, commenced an action for libel against the publisher,
and dismissed its contributor from the school; a hard
punishment, it seems, for so trivial a delinquency, and
unwise to give such consideration to the foolish produc-
tions of boys. The circumstance reminds us of a similar
event, of recent occurrence, which was treated with much
more temper and judgment. In a metropolitan educa-
tional establishment, some youthful reformers undertook
to criticise the doings of their masters. A periodical was
started, bearing a formidable title, which was to make the
oppressors pale with fear. The Principal, without mani-
festing the slightest perturbation, summoned the ferocious
editor, thanked him for his flattering allusion to himself,
and mildly strangled " The Autocrat,'* at its birth.
The fame of " The Flagellant," preceded the discomfited
writer to Oxford, and on his presenting himself at Christ
Church, the Dean, Cyril Jackson, most imreasonably
declined to receive him. Long years afterwards, the
University, amid unbounded acclamations, conferred its
highest honours on the man ' she once could treat thus
harshly. When will it be discovered that the justest
and the soundest policy for that body to pursue, is to
throw open their college doors as widely as possible ? If
fiill permission to grant or refuse admittance to a great
public institution be unreservedly entrusted to an indivi-
dual, common justice requires that such a functionary
should preserve himself pure from all prejudicial bias, and
hold his important privilege, not as a private appanage^
but as a tinist, solely for the public good.
Digitized by VjOOQIC
352 ROBERT SOUTHEY.
Southey was however admitted at Balliol College, and
went into residence in January, 1793. The principal event
that marked his college career was his acquaintance with
Coleridge. That singular compound of grandeur and
littleness was an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cam-
bridge. In June, 1794, he visited Oxford, was intro-
duced to Southey, with whom a common sympathy in
tastes and opinions begat an intimacy which speedily
ripened into friendship.
Those were days of excitement, nay, of frenzy. The
French Revolution had burst upon Europe ; political trials
tore in pieces the usual equanimity of English society, and
the writings of Burke were the theme of universal lauda-
tion or invective. Coleridge talked, debated, speculated,
with all the ardour of his imaginative and capacious in-
tellect ; while the writings of Godwin and Rousseau had
excited in Southey's mind the most distorted views of tbc
capabilities and ends of civil society. Then did theae
two dreamers converse gravely of Pantisocracy. The
distracted world was to be edified by the visible realization
of a scheme, more ideal and perfect than had ever amused
the fancy or beguiled the tedium of poet or philosopher.
On the banks of the Susquehannah a community should
arise, in which patriarchal innocence and European refine-
ment were to harmonize in blending beauty. Laws would
be superfluous ; selfishness proscribed ; contention, discord,
and crime become unknown words. Their territory, the
purchase of their joint contributions, should be tilled by
their common labour. The wives of the party were to
perform all the necessary domestic offices, and no un-
sympathizing bachelor was to profane by his presence that
select elysium. Lovell, a quaker-poet, and another Oxford
man, named Burnett, embraced their views; and their
number eventually swelled to twenty-five. Gradually,
however, the enthusiasm was neutralized, by the very
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ROBERT SOUTH EY. 353
cause that had contributed to its creation. The two poets
were at Bristol, the place chosen as their port of ei!nbarka^
tion. Cottle, the publisher, who had formed their acquain-
tance, and looked up to them with affectionate pride, made
himself wretched by harping upon the day that was to
bear them beyond the broad Atlantic. A laconic epistle
from Coleridge opened his eyes and dispelled his fears. It
consisted of a single sentence, but the commencement was
pointedly sigflificant. " My dear Sir," wrote the reformer,
" can you conveniently lend me five pounds ? as we want
a little more than four pounds to make up our lodging
bin." Cottle sent off the money with tears of joy.
Oh ye publishers! has ever your craft produced his
fellow?
He had been invited to join their society, but had
modestly excused himself on the plea of unworthiness. He
introduced, however, his new friends to several persons in
the neighbourhood, and they repaid him to the best of their
ability. " Each of them," says he, " read me his produc-
tions, each accepted my invitations ;" and we learn without
surprise that these regenerators of the human race thought
Bristol a " very pleasant residence."
Various schemes were devised to provide for current
expenses; they proposed a magazine, but such a work
was not to be "undertaken without a certainty of in-
demnification," and such a certainty could not be ensured,
notwithstanding Southey's confidence of being able " to
make it the best thing of the kind ever published." They
obtained a small, though timely supply, by delivering each
a course of lectures, Southey on History, and Coleridge
on Politics ; while Cottle offered them thirty guineas each
for their poems, Coleridge having in vain attempted to
find a publisher for his in London. Meanwhile the
emigration movement stood still. Southey, who was
the first to awake to a perception of its absurdity, pro-
A A
Digitized by VjOOQIC
354 ROBERT SOUTHEY.
posed a preliminary trial in Wales, to which Coleridge
instinctively objected ; and when at last the head of the
Pantisocratists announced to their philosophic defender
the fatal tidings of his secession from the " aspheterising"
society, the indignation of the thwarted colonizer shook
for a while the equanimity of the friend.
Southey's "Joan of Arc," written in 1793, had been
announced for publication by subscription, but subscribers
were slow to come forward. He happened to read a
porti(m of it to Cottle, who, with characteristic generosity,
immediately offered him fifty guineas for the copyright,
together with fifty copies for his subscribers. Southey
was too rejoiced to hesitate, and set himself diligently to
work, correcting and recomposing. He studied as models,
the Bible, Homer, and Ossian, and, with an unexpe<)ted
bathos, we are told, that his style was " much ameliorated
by, Bowles." During the fervour of the scheme of Pan-
tisooracy, he had fallen in love with Miss Fricker, one
of whose sisters was the wife of Lovell, and another,
Coleridge shortly afterwards married. The design of the
emigration and the intended marriage had been entrusted
to his mother, who was to have accompanied the colo-
nists ; but the cautious enthusiast had been most careful
to prevent any rumour of these grave matters reaching the
ears of Miss Tyler. But great revolutions in society
will indicate their approach. Officious gossip whispered
the astounding intelligence, and the storm burst upon
his poor head with a fury as violent as it was sudden.
He was turned out of doors, penniless, on a stormy night
(Friday, Oct. 18th, 1794), and, after having walked from
Bath that morning, had to retrace his journey on foot,
through wind and pelting rain ; and the aunt and nephew
were never afterwards reconciled.
He had quitted Oxford, partly because his religious views
would have been a bar to his entrance into the Church,
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ROBERT SOUTHEY. 355
partly through the faflure of his father's resources ; and
he now found himself thrown upon the world without
any visible means of support, his relatives offended, and
a dowerless maiden about to become his bride. " 1 could
not enter the Church," he afterwards wrote, " nor had I
finances to study physic ; I have not the gift of making
shoes, nor the happy art of mending them; education
has unfitted me for trade, and I must perforce enter the
muster-roll of authors." But the alternative pleased him.
A secret gratification accompanied his perplexities. Why
should he fret, if opposing circumstances pushed him from
the ordinary track? They but afforded him a pretext
to tread that thorny ascent he was inwardly resolved
to attempt. As he paced the streets wearied, desolate,
not knowing where to obtain the morrow's meal, he felt
little concern on that account; he was busied on better
things, shaping high themes of tragic dignity, and giving
a language to the craving thoughts that crowded his
fertile imagination.
His unde, Mr. Hill, who held a chaplaincy at Lisbon,
to wean him from his imprudent attachment, and to
withdraw him from the influence of his theorizing friends,
proposed that he should accompany him on his return
to Portugal. But the love for his fair Edith was of that
equable but ardent nature, which can see no obstacles to
its consummation. When it was settled that he should
leave England, he fixed a day for his marriage. The
ceremony was performed within the fine old pile of Red-
cliffe Church (Nov. 14th, 1795), and he then immediately
prepared for his voyage. " My Edith persuades me to
go, and then weeps that I am going;" and sadly his
maiden-wife watched his departure, with her wedding-
ring hanging round her neck. The affection thus
strangely testified, deepened with advancing years, and knew
no cold vicissitude till made holy by the touch of death.
A\ 2
Digitized by VjOOQIC
356 ROBERT SOUTHEY.
His residence abroad, which lasted from November
1795 to May 1796, gave rise to his "Letters from Spain
and Portugal," and on his return he commenced writing
for " The Monthly Magazine'* and other periodicals. " I
am continually writing or reading," he observes, in a letter
to a friend; "if industry can do anything for any man,
it shall for me. My plan is to study from five in the
morning till eight, from nine till twelve, and from one
till four. The evenings are my own." Meantime he
projected Epics, Tragedies, Histories, Romances ; nothing
was too arduous for his bold ambition.
To ensure a competence, however, he proposed to under-
take the study of the law, though without any serious
intention of devoting himself to the profession. When
a sufficiency had been gained, he would retire to the
country, and his first Christmas fire should be made of
his calf-bound volumes. "Oh, Grosvenor," he writes,
" what a blessed bonfire !" No wonder the study baffled
him. That rugged mistress must be perseveringly wooed,
and for her own sake alone, otherwise the brightest minds
will fail where every day we see plodding mediocrity
excel.
He looked forward to a residence in London with a
shrinking dread; and it was with undisguised dissatis-
faction he went up and entered himself at Gray*s Inn.
(Feb. 7th, 1797). His old schoolfellow at Westminster,
Mr. C. W. W. Wynn, with rare and honourable generosity,
offered him an annuity of £160 per annum, which he
frankly accepted. <
In the spring, thinking his law studies could be pursued
as successfully in the country as in London, he took
lodgings at Burton, in Hampshire. Here he soon found
himself to his heart's delight, the centre of a family group.
His mother joined Wm, and his brother Thomas, a mid-
shipman just released from prison at Brest. Charles
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ROBERT SOUTHEY. 357
Lloyd, afterwards classed wifh the Lake School, and
Cottle, paid him a visit ; and here commenced his lasting
friendship with Bickman, one of the guests at Lamb's
Wednesday evening suppers. He next removed to Bath,
and at the end of the year returned to London. He
wrote for " The Critical Review," prepared a second edition
of " Joan of Arc," and ^till talked of reading law ; but he
fancied London disagreed with him, and removed to
Bristol. Burnet, the quondam Pantisocratist, had become
a Unitarian minister at Norwich. Southey had placed his
younger brother Henry with him as a private pupil, and
seized the excuse to visit that city, where he became
acquainted with the celebrated William Taylor.
On his return, he took a small house at Westbury, near
Bristol, and in March, 1799, went up to London to keep
his term. The day after his arrival he wrote to his wife,
telling her he was already home-sick, and planning how he
might soonest do his work and get back. The old book-
stalls afforded him his only amusement, and his delight
was great on exhuming several scarce and ponderous epics
in French and Italian — lured to them, it would seem, by
some mysterious sympathy — and the perusal of which was
to constitute the ravishing employment of his evenings at
home. " I have had self-denial enough," he writes,
" (admire me Edith !) to abstain from these books till
my return."
It became daily more evident that he was to look to
his pen for subsistence, but the prospect to an ordinary
mind would have been sufficiently discouraging. With all
his prodigious toil, he had made little impression on the
public. His rejection of rhyme, and the novel form in
which he cast his poems, offended the ear of a generation
tuned to a more regular rhythm ; while his political views
affected their sale, as in those heated times men refused,
or were unable, to discriminate the poet from the partizan.
Digitized by VjOOQIC
358 ROBERT SOUTHEY.
Nevertheless, he was steadily acquiring a reputation among
the publishers, and could calculate on constant and tolerably
remunerative employment. His years now numbered five-
and-twenty. He had passed through a difficult youth, but
his conduct had been uniformly pure. He had never
stooped to the easy palliation of misfortune or impulsive
temperament as an excuse for youthful depravity, and in
the darkest season had resolutely borne up against des-
pondency. Once only, he had allowed the yearning of
affection to stifle prudential warnings ; unless, indeed, such
an abandonment of self be not in the end man's highest
prudence. Experience had chastened his romantic aspira-
tions. His views were becoming more sober and more
enlarged. And so, with cheerful brow, he faced the future.
The past gave him no cause for regret, and, with his
Edith by his side, he could look forward with hope, and
love would consecrate toil.
" Madoc" had been commenced before " Joan of Arc"
was planned ; he now resumed it, and before long,
" Thalaba," too, was on the anvil, as with his astonishing
facility, one epic was scarcely completed before he was
midway in another. His health sank under such con-
tinuous labour, and a change of air was imperatively
urged by his fnends. He was expecting to raise the
necessary funds for a trip to Germany by the sale of his
" Thalaba," when a strong desire came over him to pay a
second visit to Portugal.
In April, 1800, after waiting several days for a fair
wind, he embarked at Falmouth, with Mrs. Southey, in
the Lisbon packet. The weather was fine, but both
the travellers suflfered severely from sea-sickness. One
morning, to add to their disquietude, a cutter with EngKsh
colours, but evidently French, was seen bearing down
upon them. They signalled; no notice was taken. A
gun was fired and immediately answered ; an action •
Digitized by VjOOQIC
ROBERT SOUTHEV. 359
seemed inevitable. They mounted ten guns, their com-
panion packet seven; but the cutter was more than a
match for both. All were in a bustle of preparation;
Mrs. Southey, pale and trembling, was conveyed to the
cockpit, and Southey, musket in hand, took his station on
the quarter-deck. The cutter swept between the two
vessels with contemptuous calmness. She was so near,
that the smoke from her matches was clearly discernible.
They hailed her, and were replied to in broken English,
and the object of dread passed on. She was veritably
English, though manned chiefly ^ by Guernsey men.
Southey felt an " honest joy^' at this satisfactory conclusion.
*^ I laid the musket in the chest,^' says he, " with con-
siderably more pleasure than I took it out.''
He remained at Lisbon a month or two, renewing old
associations, and in July took up his abode at Cintra. Here
he busied himself in collecting materials for his ^' History
of Portugal," the work that was to hand down his name to
posterity, almost the first and the last day dream of his
Ufe. He devoted himself likewise to the assiduous study
of Portuguese literature, nothing daunted by its compara-
tively imimportant character. " It is not worth much,"
says he, " but it is not from the rose and the violet only
that the bee sucks honey."
He missed at first the companionship and conversation
of his friends. ^*Here I lack society," he wrote, "and
were it not for a self-sufficiency (like the bear who sucks
his paws when the snow shuts him up in his den) should
be in a state of famine ;" but this want kept him with the
greater steadiness at his studies. He formed also an
attachment for the neighbourhood of Cintra^ and contem-
plated a return to England with evident reluctance. His
health materially improved, and the glowing scenery
of his temporary home grew familiar to his imagination.
Digitized by VjOOQIC
360 ROBERT SOUTHEY.
The river with its mountain boundary, the winter sun, and
the sununer paradise of myrtle and orange trees entranced
him with their ever-increasing attractions. '^ I would
gladly live and die here," he exclaimed ; but his literary
plans operated to counteract any such inclinations, and he
became anxious with the help of English libraries to
digest and arrange the profuse materials he had been so
diligently collecting. Coleridge had taken up his abode at
Keswick, and his thoughts turned to a home near his
friend. The distance, however, from Bristol and London,
the two foci of his publishing interests weighed with liim
against such a decision, and he turned a wistAil eye to
Allfoxen in Somersetshire, where Wordsworth had resided.
In June (1801) he returned to England and proceeded
direct to Bristol. His friends were gratified by his altered
appearance ; his health was re-established, and the nervous
symptoms induced by a sedentary life and excessive task-
work of the brain, had been dispelled by change of climate,
and the vicissitudes of travel.
Coleridge invited him to Greta Hall, and sent him the
following description of the place which, after his many
and uncertain wanderings ; eventually became his fixed and
permanent home. " Our house stands on a low hill, the
whole fi-ont of which is one field, and an enormous garden,
nine-tenths of which is a nursery garden. Behind the
house is an orchard, and a small wood on a steep slope, at
the foot of which flows the river Greta, which winds
round and catches the evening lights in the fi-ont of the
house. In front we have a giant's camp — an encamped
army of tent-like mountains, which by an inverted arch
gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely
vale and the wedge-shaped Lake of Bassenthwaite, and on
our left Derwentwater and Lodore fiiU in view, and the