So good, so estimable, so eminent a man as Southey—one whose moral character was perhaps as near to perfection as it is given to humanity to attain, and whose literary works, if not of the very highest order of genius, fall short only when compared with those few which are of the very highest—such a man as Southey, it was not likely we should allow to pass from amongst the living without some tribute bestowed upon his memory, or some attempt made, to appreciate the value of his long and illustrious labours. We have been somewhat tardy, it maybe thought, in fulfilling this duty. But we do not regret the delay. Our topic is not one of an ephemeral nature, and the delay may perhaps have instructed us in those points of view in which it is most needful that our subject should be placed.

There is nothing, for instance, so well known of Southey—if we may be allowed to anticipate a little, and to plunge, like the epic poets, in medias res—nothing so notorious as the change which his political and social opinions underwent; the sentiments of his youth upon government, and the organisation of society, being almost diametrically opposed to those of his maturer years. The contrast is great between the young republican, the ardent communist, the bold experimenter in Pantisocracy, the author of the Book of the Church, and the celebrated champion of Conservative principles in the Quarterly Review. But often as the contrast has been held up to notice, the time has only just arrived when it can be surveyed in the right spirit. The whole life of the man is now before us; and, contradictory as the parts may have appeared as the long picture was slowly unrolled to the eyes of contemporaries, it now becomes possible for us to see the real coherence that existed between the several parts, and to trace throughout their very inconsistencies a unity, and an honourable unity, of character. The enthusiasm of the youth enables us to understand whatever was peculiar in the maturer man. The earlier mind of Southey throws light, we think, upon the later. It was the same mind, it was the same man, young and old.

We learn from the biography before us, that the imagination of Southey had been early and too exclusively developed; and whether from this circumstance, or from natural temperament, a close, systematic, scientific mode of reasoning was the mental quality or mental exercise in which, throughout life, he least distinguished himself. His affections were ardent and generous, his moral sentiments invariably pure and noble, his piety unalterable; his judgment, wherever abstract and general principles were to be dealt with, was, to the last, often hasty, incomplete, vague, uncertain. But if his reasoning was never that "dry light" of which Bacon speaks, it never, in his case, was mingled with other passions or feelings than those which did honour to his nature. Above all, there was throughout his career the utmost sincerity in the expression of his opinion; no taint of hypocrisy, no reserve, no timidity—a want sometimes of caution, never that prudence which is the disguise of cowardice,—you had at all times the genuine unaffected utterance of the man. He was not even the least apprehensive of ridicule. He would have borne martyrdom before a host of jesters, which some have thought to be not the lightest species of martyrdom. If astrology had found favour in his sight, he would have expressed his belief in it before the whole conclave of the Royal Society. Whatever seemed truth to him, had its clear, manly, unhesitating avowal. Of an ardent disposition, impatient of slow thinking or of long and intricate reasoning, eager, confident, somewhat too self-relying, his was not the mind peculiarly fitted for expounding abstract principles;—we note no extraordinary deficiency in this respect, but we can easily conceive of minds better trained and disciplined for the discovery of great elementary truths;—but few men in our age and generation have manifested a warmer or more generous attachment to whatever assumed to them the shape of truth. For this he was ready to do battle to the utmost. No crusader could be more valiant, or go forth with fuller faith, or be more resolved at all hazards to drive out the infidel, and take possession of the Holy City. His geography was once at fault, or the territory and scene curiously shifted, and his Jerusalem was at one time due west, and at another due east; but it was the same devoted uncompromising knight that was seen marching towards it.

Those only who have never thought at all, or who have quite forgotten their past efforts at thinking, will throw blame upon another because the opinions of his his youth were different from those of his manhood. Such difference is almost the necessary attendant upon progress and mental development. The ardour and the candour of Southey's nature made the difference in his case singularly conspicuous. He lived, too, at that epoch when the French Revolution made and unmade so many enthusiasts. This may be thought a sufficient vindication of his memory. But there remains to add one very honourable distinction. Many of those whom the French Revolution had made enthusiasts in the cause of human progress, became cold and dead and utterly indifferent to that cause—selfishly callous, or quite sceptical as to the possible improvements which might be effected in society. Now, Southey changed his opinion on many subjects, but he never deserted the cause of human improvement. He would have promoted very different measures at different periods, but he had the same cause always at heart. He never sank into a cold and selfish indifference; nor was it a mere passive conservatism that he ever advocated. His son has here very justly pointed out that, as a writer in the Quarterly Review, in which character he was thought to have consummated his apostasy, it was the renegade Southey who drew attention to the state of the poor, who called on the Government for a scheme of national education, who pointed out the folly of neglecting our great colonial possessions, and the necessity of adopting some large and judicious plan of emigration. Of the topics which occupy reflective and philanthropic men at this moment, pauperism, national education, and emigration are three of the most conspicuous; and in each of these Southey may claim to have led the way, in drawing towards them that public attention which they so eminently deserve. He is always alive to whatever seems to him a feasible scheme for the improvement of society. If he goes abroad, and visits the Beguinages in Belgium, he thinks whether a like institution might not be introduced into Protestant England, for the benefit of a class of women, whether single or widowed, who with difficulty find any active employment—who are not paupers, but whose poverty condemns them to a cheerless, solitary existence. If Robert Owen of Lanark comes across his path, no fear of having his own early dream of Pantisocracy revived before him, of being reproached for an old abandoned faith, (the constant terror of men who feel themselves apostates,) prevents him from expressing the natural interest which such a man, and the projects he then had in view, naturally excited within him. His Colloquies may not earn him a reputation amongst political economists; but no one will deny the philanthropic spirit which they breathe. In his Life of Wesley, and all his religious or theological publications, however devoted he may show himself to the Church of England, he never fails to inquire how this great institution may be made still more serviceable to the nation at large, and this, too, by embracing within its pale those very sectaries towards whom he was accused of having so bigoted and unfriendly a feeling.

Those of his opponents who, in the later part of his career, were accustomed to represent Southey as the unscrupulous, drilled, formal advocate of a party in Church and State, ready for his pension and his pay, for court honours and the praise of bishops, to espouse its cause to the utmost, never made a greater mistake in their lives. Innumerable proofs are here before us in his letters, if we did not find them in his works, that he retained to the last a certain bold, erratic, independent manner of thinking, quite his own.

Always was he Robert Southey, and no representative of a party. At one time of his life he contemplated the profession of the law, and studied for the bar. What sort of lawyer he might have made, if he had been able to give up his mind to the study, or what the practice of Westminster Hall might have made of him, there is no saying; but there was never any literary men, earning subsistence by his pen, who had less of the spirit of the retained advocate. A self-willed, untamed, quite individual manner of looking at things, is always breaking out. If he had taken that seat in Parliament which, without any consultation of his wishes, was so strangely bestowed upon him, he would, we are persuaded, have greatly disappointed any party that might have relied upon his steady and unswerving co-operation. He would often have deserted them for the cross benches, and as often perplexed them by his uncompromising zeal. No whipper-in would have been quite sure of him, or kept him steady in the ranks. In that position where he was most subject to restraint—as a writer in the Quarterly—it is amusing to see how restive he is, how he rears and plunges at first starting, how he chafes at that harness which each one in such a team must be content to wear, though every steed were a veritable Pegasus, and Apollo himself in the editorial car. He thinks "a sprinkling of my free and fearless way of thinking would win friends" for the Review. "It is my nature and my principle," he says, "to speak and write as earnestly, as plainly, and as straight to the mark as I think and feel. If the editor understands his own interest, he will not restrict me." We must confess, judging by the ebullitions he sometimes gives vent to in these letters, that the most indulgent editor must have been occasionally called upon to "restrict" a certain impetuosity of manner, which, it may be observed, would have embarrassed Mr Gifford almost as much as it would have done Mr Jeffrey.

But from this somewhat rash incursion into the very centre of our subject, it would be wise—since we are not, in fact, epic poets—to effect a timely retreat; let us recommence, after the more legitimate manner of prosaic reviewers, with some account of the work immediately before us.

The Life and Correspondence of Dr Southey, which is here presented to the public, answers fairly to the description which the author, or editor, himself gives of it in his preface. A number of letters are arranged according to their dates, and are connected together with just such intimations of a biographical nature as enable them to tell their own story. The life of Southey, meaning thereby a skilful narrative and analysis of incident and character, remains, of course, to be written; and a very interesting work it will prove, if it falls into fortunate hands. Meanwhile, this collection of letters, many of them delightful compositions, and perfect models of epistolary style, gives us such an insight into, and appreciation of the man Southey, as was previously impossible to any one who did not know him personally and intimately. The editor has performed his part in a very creditable and judicious manner. It would have been very difficult for the son to conduct a rigid and impartial scrutiny into the literary merits of the father, and he has not attempted it; but it would have been the easiest thing in the world for that son, or for any other editor, to have spoilt such a work as this by intrusive panegyric, by constant controversy with old and hostile criticisms, by perpetual contest for place and pre-eminence for his biographical idol. The mere vanity of authorship, or an officious spirit, might have given a repulsive air to what is now a most agreeable book. There are cases, and this is one of them, where, considering the temptations that beset an editor, the absence of cause for censure becomes no slight ground of commendation.

The letters of Southey are preceded by the fragment of an autobiography. Would it were more than a fragment! The author, we are told, had looked forward to this task as one of a very agreeable nature; and, so far as he proceeded with it, appears to have found it such; for he revels in the reminiscences of childhood and his school-days, and describes the old house in Bristol in which he lived when a boy, with a loving minuteness that is in danger of outrunning the interest which any one but himself could feel in such a locality. But even before his school-days are quite over, he drops the pen. To one who had so much necessary employment for that pen, a supererogatory labour of this description ought to be very attractive, and apparently he found in his task, as he advanced, increasing difficulties and decreasing pleasure.

The reminiscences of childhood, of boyhood, and even of the first entrance into youth, have to almost all men an indescribable charm. Up to this time, we look back upon ourselves with a curious feeling, as if it were not altogether ourselves we were contemplating, but rather some other being who preceded us, and whose thoughts and feelings are the sole remembrance of them we have inherited. We look back upon the frailties of that other self with an unlimited indulgence; we smile at his errors, at his passions, at his griefs; we even sport with his absurdities, and can afford to throw a playful ridicule over all the follies he committed. This child that we are playing with is ourself, but still it is only a child; and we have the fuller right to play with it because it is ourself. No sense of responsibility intervenes to disturb this singular amusement, where the adult is seen toying with and holding in his arms the image of his own infancy. But when this early pre-existent state has passed in review, and the real man is summoned forth upon the scene, we begin to feel that this is indeed ourselves; and we become too implicated and too much involved in the part he performs, to enjoy any longer the position of an imaginary spectator. We are sensitive to the errors, and responsible for the faults, of this other self; we cannot treat him with cavalier indifference; we must be his advocate or his censor. The retrospect assumes a quite different character. Formerly we called up a departed self from some half-fabulous region of the past, and questioned it as to its ways of thinking and acting; we now stand ourselves in the witness-box, and give our testimony; and the best of us must occasionally assume the sullen aspect of an unwilling witness. Formerly we sported with the past absurdity, ridiculed and laughed at it; but now the remembered folly, the sentimental effusion of the youth, the absurd oratorical display, the ridiculous exhibition, of whatever kind it may have been, affords us no amusement. It matters not what the distance of time, the cheek tingles with the reminiscence. What is still more to the purpose, the griefs and afflictions which we have now to summon up are the same in character as those we continue to feel, and their recollection is but a renewal of suffering. The affliction of the child rarely revives an affliction in the man—very often calls up a smile at the idea that so much distress had been felt at so trivial a cause. This is one reason why childhood appears, in our review of human life, so much happier than any other portion of it. We find a mirth in its remembered tears which assuredly we never discovered when they were flowing. But the remembrance of the sorrows of a later period is but sorrow itself, and we only taste again the bitterness of grief.

To Southey, whose disposition rendered him peculiarly susceptible to those domestic losses which death occasions, this last appears to have been one chief reason for the distaste he felt for his task as he proceeded in it. Certainly it soon lost its zest. During the early and playful portions of the biography, he holds on his way with alacrity and delight; he ransacks his memory, and brings out with great glee whatever odd and strange things he finds there; but the Westminster boy has not run his career before the theme has changed its aspect. At all events, it has no longer sufficient interest to make a time and leisure for itself amongst the crowded occupations of the author.

In the record of his childhood which Southey has given us, we have no reason, as we have intimated, to complain of the want of detail. Indeed, some circumstances are related which at first we thought might as well have been passed over in silence. It appeared to us that everything which a person can possibly recollect of his own childhood, cannot be interesting to others, although every such effort of recollection may be extremely amusing to the reminiscent himself; and we were prepared to read a lecture to all future autobiographers, and to remind them that they must distinguish between the pleasure of memory, of rescuing the half-forgotten incident from threatened oblivion—a pleasure which must be exclusively their own—and the value which the rescued fact itself may possess in the estimation of the world at large. But while we were preparing this lecture, a little incident occurred which gave us a lesson ourselves, and induced us to withhold this part of our criticism. Such details as we have alluded to, not only give pleasure to the reminiscent, but occasion exactly the same pleasure to those in whom they call up similar recollections; and we had overlooked the extreme difficulty the critic, or any one reader, must have in determining which of such details is absolutely without this species of interest for other readers. What seems to him as really "too absurd" to be worth mentioning, may awaken vivid emotions in another in whom it calls up a similar remembrance from the all-but-forgotten past: he shares in the very pleasure of the original reminiscent. Whilst we were perusing this autobiography, and our pencil was straying down the margin of a passage we intended to quote as an example of a quite superfluous effort of recollection, a friend called in upon us. We read to him this identical passage. To our astonishment, it had thrown him into a perfect ecstasy of delight. It had recalled an image of his schoolboy days which had never once been revived since he left school, and which he was certain would never again have occurred to him but for the paragraph we had read. Here is the passage:—

"One very odd amusement, which I never saw or heard of elsewhere, was greatly in vogue at this school. It was performed with snail shells, by placing them against each other, point to point, and pressing till the one was broken in, or sometimes both. This was called conquering; and the shell that remained unhurt, acquired esteem and value in proportion to the number over which it had triumphed, an accurate account being kept. A great conqueror was prodigiously prized and coveted—so much so indeed, that two of this description would seldom have been brought to contest the palm, if both possessors had not been goaded to it by reproaches and taunts. The victor had the number of its opponent's triumphs added to its own; thus, when one conqueror of fifty conquered another which had been as often victorious, it became conqueror of an hundred and one. Yet, even in this, reputation was sometimes obtained upon false pretences. I found a boy one day who had fallen in with a great number of young snails, so recently hatched that the shells were still transparent, and he was besmearing his fingers by crushing these poor creatures one after another against his conqueror, counting away with the greatest satisfaction at his work. He was a good-natured boy, so that I, who had been bred up to have a sense of humanity, ventured to express some compassion for the snails, and to suggest that he might as well count them and lay them aside unhurt. He hesitated, and seemed inclined to assent, till it struck him as a point of honour, or of conscience, and then he resolutely said, No! that would not do, for he could not then fairly say he had conquered them. There is a surprising difference of strength in these shells, and that not depending on the size or species; I mean whether yellow, brown, or striped. It might partly be estimated by the appearance of the point or top, (I do not know what better term to use;) the strong ones were usually clear and glossy there, and white if the shell were of the large, coarse, mottled brown kind. The top was then said to be petrified; and a good conqueror of this description would triumph for weeks or months. I remember that one of the greatest heroes bore evident marks of having once been conquered. It had been thrown away on some lucky situation, where the poor tenant had leisure to repair his habitation, or rather where the restorative power of nature repaired it for him, and the wall was thus made stronger than it had been before the breach, by an arch of new masonry below. But in general I should think the resisting power of the shell depended upon the geometrical nicety of form."—(Vol. i. p. 55.)

This odd amusement, it seems, was not monopolised by young Southey's school. "Oh, I remember it well!" cried my enraptured auditor. "Yes, conqueror was the word. But Southey is wrong! It was the empty shell only that we used. How distinctly I remember it!—and it must be thirty years ago—and never once till this moment have I thought of it since. How strange a thing is memory! You hold the shell, you see, between your forefinger and thumb, the forefinger being bent to receive it. Your adversary did the like with his shell. Then you applied the boss of your little shield to the boss of his—quite fairly, you understand, boss to boss, otherwise the strongest part of one shell would come in contact with the weaker part of the other. Silently, but with all your might, you pressed them together. The one which broke through its antagonist's was, of course, the conqueror. But Southey is wrong! It was only the empty shell we used. Consider, if the animal was there—what a horrible mess!"

We ventured to suggest to our friend, as soon as his impetuosity permitted us, that Southey was describing his school, and no other school whatever; and as to the horrible mess which boys might delight in, it would be difficult to say, in such a matter, what would pass the bounds of credibility.

After this unintentional experiment, we gave up all idea of determining what might or might not be interesting amongst details of such a description. If this story of the snail-shells found its ardent admirer or sympathiser, what other could possibly be pronounced to be superfluous? or down the margin of what other passage could our critical and expurgatorial pencil have safely strayed? To as little purpose, we apprehend, should we undertake to examine such stories on the grave historic ground of their perfect credibility. When "Uncle William," who is half an idiot, plays a trick upon the servant Thomas, and substitutes a dead mouse for his quid of tobacco, the thought did occur to us, that although a mouse is a very small animal, it would surely make an enormous quid—altogether a most extraordinary substitute for a quid—and that the servant Thomas must have been the greatest idiot of the two to have been deceived by it. But such carping criticism, we repeat, would be altogether out of place; and this fragment of autobiography is really too amusing to excite any other feeling than that of regret at its sudden termination.

We learn from it that Southey was born on the 12th August 1774. His father was a linendraper at Bristol, and by no means prosperous in his calling. He passed his childhood, however, for the most part under the roof of a maiden aunt, Miss Tyler, who resided at Bath. To this house at Bath we must, therefore, betake ourselves, if we would learn the circumstances which assisted in forming the mind of the future poet and historian. To be born the son of a linendraper we hold to be no evil; but to have been bred up in the shop at Bristol would have been to Southey a real calamity. From this he was spared. The linendraper's shop may figure on his shield, if the malicious herald is disposed to place it there; it had nothing to do with his head, or his heart, or his manners; he was bred a gentleman. Moreover, he had exactly that sort of breeding which is calculated to foster the imagination, and develop whatever there was of poetry within him. Miss Tyler had two passions—one for order and cleanliness, the other for the theatre. She had, too, a free admission; and young Southey, at an age when other little boys are fain to content themselves with turning over the leaves of the great picture-book, was seated, night after night, in the front row of the boxes, a delighted spectator of the performances of one of the best companies in England. His first library—and this he possessed as soon as he could read—was a whole set, more than twenty in number, "of Mr Newbury's fairy tales, or other wonderful stories; delectable histories in sixpenny books for children, splendidly bound in flowered and gilt Dutch paper, of former days." This library, and free admission to the theatre, and, for the rest, much idleness, few companions, and a world of dreams,—such is the opening scene of Southey's mental history.

"I had seen more plays before I was seven years old," he says, "than I have seen since I was twenty." Miss Tyler, it seems, was living at one time with some ladies whose property was vested in the theatre. From their house—

"A covered passage led to the play-house, and they very rarely missed a night's performance. I was too old to be put to bed before the performance began, and it was better that I should be taken than left with the servants; therefore I was always of the party; and it is impossible to describe the thorough delight which I received from this habitual indulgence. No after-enjoyment could equal or approach it; I was sensible of no defects either in the dramas or in the representation; better acting, indeed, could nowhere have been found: Mrs Siddons was the heroine; Dimond and Murray would have done credit to any stage; and among the comic actors were Edwin and Blanchard—and Blisset, who, though never known to a London audience, was, of all comic actors whom I have seen, the most perfect. But I was happily insensible to that difference between good and bad acting, which in riper years takes off so much from the pleasure of dramatic representation; everything answered the height of my expectations and desires. And I saw it in perfect comfort, in a small theatre, from the front row of a box, not too far from the centre. The Bath theatre was said to be the most comfortable in England; and no expense was spared in the scenery and decorations."—(Vol. i. p. 71.)

Frequenting the theatre soon introduced him to far other literature than Mr Newbury's publications. Shakespere was in his hands, he says, as soon as he could read. He went through Beaumont and Fletcher before he was eight years old. What hosts of plays beside he may have devoured, it was probably beyond his power to recall. And he early began to imitate what he read. In one passage he leaves us to gather that his first attempts at poetry were so early, that they went beyond the time of memory.

Miss Tyler had all along intended to give her protegÉ a systematic education, and for this purpose she had purchased a translation of Rousseau's Emilius. The systematic education, however, was never commenced. In 1782 he was placed—for what reason we are not told—as a day-boarder in a school at Bristol. He then necessarily resided with his father. Two years after, Miss Tyler herself removed to Bristol, and again received her nephew. But in this interval of two years, the holidays were always spent with his aunt, wherever she might be. It was in these holidays that his real education was carried on.

At home he was on very short allowance of books. His father read nothing but the Bristol Journal. A small glass cupboard in the back parlour, fastened up against the wall, was sufficient to hold the wine-glasses and all the library. But in the holidays he gets back again to Bath, and to Bull's circulating library. He meets, at his aunt's, people who talk about authors—even sees an author or two—learns that they are greater personages even than the players. In one of these holidays a lady gives him a copy of Hoole's translation of the Jerusalem Delivered. This led him into a new course of poetical reading; it converted the budding dramatist into an epic poet. The Tasso introduced him to the translation of the Orlando Furioso, and this to Spenser's Fairy Queen. How he read, how he revelled in these books!

"The copy of Hoole's version (of Tasso) which Mrs Dolignon sent me, is now," he says, "in my sight upon the shelf, and in excellent preservation, considering that when a schoolboy I perused it so often that I had no small portion of it by heart. Forty years have tarnished the gilding upon its back, but they have not effaced my remembrance of the joy with which I received it, and the delight which I found in its repeated perusal.... Hoole, in his notes, frequently referred to the Orlando Furioso. I saw some volumes thus lettered, on Bull's counter, and my heart leaped for joy. They proved to be the original; but the shopman, Mr Cruett, (a most obliging man he was,) immediately put the translation into my hands; and I do not think any accession of fortune could now give me so much delight as I then derived from that vile version of Hoole's. There, in the notes, I first saw the name of Spenser, and some stanzas of the Fairy Queen. Accordingly, when I returned the last volume, I asked if that work was in the library. My friend Cruett replied that they had it, but it was written in old English, and I should not be able to understand it. This did not appear to me so much a necessary consequence as he supposed, and I therefore requested he would let me look at it. It was the quarto edition of '17, in three volumes, with large prints folded in the middle, equally worthless (like all the prints of that age) in design and execution. There was nothing in the language to impede, for the ear set me right where the uncouth spelling (orthography it cannot be called) might have puzzled the eye; and the few words which are really obsolete were sufficiently explained by the context. No young lady of the present generation falls to a new novel of Sir Walter Scott's with keener relish than I did that morning to the Fairy Queen."—(Vol. i. p. 83.)

He had commenced poet, as we have said, at an earlier age than he can call to mind, so that his first rhymes are utterly lost in the oblivion of childhood. He can only remember that this discovery that he could rhyme gave him great pleasure, and that his mother seemed equally gratified, and still more proud of the achievement. When in the habit of reading and witnessing so many plays, he of course wrote dramas. His first subject was "The Continence of Scipio!" Now that Tasso and Ariosto were his great delight, he commenced the epic or the metrical romance. He would graft a story upon the Orlando Furioso. Arcadia should be the scene and give the title to the poem. There he would bring the Moors, and there should his hero Astolfo, riding on a Hippogriff, &c. &c. This must have been, he says, when he was between nine and ten, for some verses of it were written on the covers of his PhÆdrus. They were in the heroic couplet.

It is curious to notice that, although writing heroic couplets on the covers of his Phoedrus, his first task in prose composition was accomplished with extreme difficulty. The master, Mr Williams, would sometimes tell the boys to write a letter upon any subject that they pleased. Nothing had ever perplexed our young poet so much as this task. He actually cried for perplexity and vexation. At last he set to work. A Salisbury Guide had fallen in his way; he wrote a long description of Stonehenge, and his master was not less surprised than delighted with it. He himself was unconscious of having done anything extraordinary, till the envy of his schoolfellows made him aware that he had surpassed them all. On coming to school next morning, some half-dozen of them beset him, and demanded "whether he, with all his learning, could tell what the letters i. e. stood for? You have written a description of Stonehenge, now tell us what i. e. stands for." Southey dashed at an answer, "John the Evangelist, I suppose." They shouted with triumph.

In after years, when Southey had written Don Roderick, there were many pedants disposed to ask him what i. e. stands for.

But now his maternal uncle, the Reverend Herbert Hill, always his kind friend and benefactor, determines to send the intelligent lad to Westminster school, and then to the University of Oxford. By way of preparation, he is removed from Mr Williams' academy, and placed under the care and tuition of a clergyman. We have not traced him through the various schools he attended—it would be waste of time; we have seen what was the real process of his education. Here, also, according to his own account, the progress of his mind was very little connected with the formal tuition he received.

"I do not remember," he says, "in any part of my life, to have been so conscious of intellectual improvement as I was during the year and a half before I was placed at Westminster; an improvement derived not from books or instruction, but from constantly exercising myself in English verse; and from the development of mind which that exercise produced, I can distinctly trace my progress by help of a list, made thirty years ago, of all my compositions in verse, which were then in existence, or which I had at that time destroyed."—(Vol. i. p. 117).

Before entering Westminster, our autobiographer takes a retrospective glance at his home in Bristol, and gives a most graphic description of his aunt, Miss Tyler. That lady has earned an immortality which she little dreamt of, and would have hardly coveted. Already every English reader knows Miss Tyler. She will live for ever as a type of that class of ladies, whether spinsters or married, who let their love of order and cleanliness grow into a disease—ladies who keep the best rooms in their house in such a superstitious neatness, that they are no longer habitable. The disorder usually drives people from their pleasant and spacious drawing-room into close back-parlours, deserving of a visit from the Sanitary Commission. In the case of Miss Tyler, it drove her from the parlour to the kitchen, from the best kitchen into what should have been the scullery. We hope those ladies in whom the disease has not yet attained such a height may take warning by the terrible example of Miss Tyler. For the rest, she was a woman of violent temper, and of a proud imperious disposition.

Of course, in a house kept with so much neatness as Miss Tyler's, no other boy was likely to be admitted; no other specimen of that race whose shoes no quantity of mats or matting could have rendered clean, or afforded sufficient protection against; and who might have even placed his corduroys on the lady's own chair—an offence which, we are assured, would have excited the highest indignation. Young Southey, therefore, had few playmates. Shad, a handy lad, kept for all manner of garden or out-of-door work, was his chief companion. He might well say that "few boys were ever less qualified for the discipline of a public school." He had, however, an elastic and buoyant spirit, which, notwithstanding this unsuitable preparation for such a scene, enabled him to meet the trials and the turmoil of Westminster school. It was on the 1st April 1788 that he entered there. A rough apprenticeship to life it seems to have been. One boy holds our epic poet out of window by the leg, to the manifest peril of his skull. Another appoints him, "by the law of fist," to write all his Latin exercises, with the special injunction that they shall be always "bad enough" to pass muster as the composition of the bully and the dunce. We suppose all this has been reformed since Southey's time, and that the following picture is curious only as a record of the past. In this "interior" the Westminster scholars look very much like a buccaneer's crew:—

"Our boarding-house was under the tyranny of W. F——. He was, in Westminster language, a great beast; that is, in plain truth, a great brute—as great a one as ever went upon two legs. But there are two sorts of human brutes; those who partake of wolf nature, or of pig nature; and F—— was of the better breed, if it be better to be wolfish than swinish. He would have made a good prize fighter, a good buccaneer, or, in the days of Coeur de Lion, or of my Cid, a good knight, to have cut down the misbelievers with a strong arm and a hearty good will. Everybody feared and hated him; and yet it was universally felt that he saved the house from the tyranny of a greater beast than himself. This was a fellow by name B——, who was mean and malicious, which F—— was not: I do not know what became of him; his name has not appeared in the Tyburn Calendar, which was the only place to look for it; and if he has been hanged, it must have been under an alias—an observation which is frequently made, when he is spoken of by his schoolfellows. He and F—— were of an age and standing, the giants of the house; but F—— was the braver, and did us the good office of keeping him in order. They hated each other cordially, and the evening before we were rid of 'Butcher B——,' F—— gave the whole house the great satisfaction of giving him a good thrashing."—(Vol. i. p. 150.)

Then follow some other and more amusing accounts of his schoolfellows, and of their after position and fortunes in the world, and the fragment concludes. It does not even relate the history of his expulsion from Westminster—apparently a very severe punishment for the offence he had committed. The boys had set up a paper called The Flagellant. In one of the numbers, which Southey had written, the subject of corporal punishment was handled in a manner which by no means pleased the headmaster; and for this offence he was, as is here expressed, privately expelled. The first appearance in print of our voluminous author was not fortunate.

With this event, therefore, Mr Cuthbert Southey commences the slight thread of biography on which these letters are strung. How far this expulsion from Westminster, by exasperating the mind of our young author, tended to foster a certain democratic and rebellious mode of thinking, we have no accurate means of judging; we can only guess that it would have some such tendency. He was now to proceed to Oxford; but the expelled of Westminster was rejected at Christ Church, in which college his uncle had particularly wished him to enter. He found refuge at Balliol, where he was admitted Nov. 3, 1792.

We have lost our guide, and the only guide that could have traced for us the course of his reading and the progress of his mind. Southey now somewhat abruptly appears before us as the ardent republican, and something verging on the communist. We left him with Tasso and the Fairy Queen, inditing or planning innumerable epics. We find him writing Wat Tyler, that poem whose singular history we shall have, by and by, to allude to. From intimations scattered through these letters, we learn that he had dieted rather freely upon Rousseau; that he had "corrected" this diet by a course of Godwin; and that with Godwin he had united Epictetus and Stoic morality. As aunt Tyler had purchased a translation of Rousseau's Emilie in order to educate her pupil, it is probable that he had heard of the philosopher of Geneva at a very early period. Perhaps it was the Contrat Social that first received him when he stepped from poetry to philosophy. At all events, the captivating ideas of perfect liberty and equality, which are there set forth, had taken full possession of his youthful mind.

At college his industry was still of the same vagrant self-directed description that it had hitherto been. He read much, but he did not distinguish himself in the special studies of the place, nor desired to do so. Now his uncle, the Rev. H. Hill, had designed that his nephew should enter the Church, where only he had the means of assisting his future advancement in life. When Southey first came to Oxford, he contemplated this as his future destination, though probably with no very good will. But it is quite evident that his course of reading and thinking has not been fitting him for the Church; and we are not at all surprised to find that this disinclination to take holy orders amounts at length to a decided and unconquerable repugnance. We might be rather surprised to find, as we do, that, throughout this era of the reign of liberty and equality, he retains his fervent and deep-rooted sentiments of piety. What exactly his theological creed had become, we have no distinct evidence before us: probably it was unsettled enough. But it is quite remarkable how strong a faith he has, throughout the whole of his career, in the great fundamental doctrine of religion—a future state of existence. It is no mere doctrinal belief, no dim and shadowy foreboding; it was such a belief as a European has in the existence of the continent of America. No emigrant can have a stronger conviction that he shall reach the new country he has embarked for, or that he shall meet such of his friends as have preceded him on the same voyage, than Southey has in that future world to which we are sailing over the ocean of time.

Mr Cuthbert Southey very wisely refrains from speaking decidedly upon his father's religious opinions. He leaves the impression on our mind that, according to his view, the Unitarian heresy was the utmost limit of his divergence from the orthodox standard. We doubt if Southey, at this time, had formed any doctrinal system full and precise enough to be classed under the name of Unitarianism. However that may be, it was impossible for him, with his relaxed creed, and his high sense of moral rectitude, to think of entering the Church. Such unhappily being the state of his opinions, he very properly abandoned all idea of taking orders. At a subsequent period of his life, we may remark that his repugnance to subscribe the articles of the Church of England may very fairly be attributed far more to the moral feelings than to the religious opinions of the man, far more to an extreme scrupulosity and the reluctance to fetter himself, than to any absolute heresy. This we may have an opportunity of showing as we advance farther in the correspondence.

But the Church being resigned, it was necessary to look out for some other career. He thinks of physic, and studies anatomy for a short time, but the dissecting-room disgusts him. He thinks, as doubtless many others have thought, and are thinking still, that some official appointment which would occupy his mornings with business, and leave his evenings for philosophy and poetry, would be a very suitable position, and he writes to his friend Bedford for his advice and interest in the matter. His friend bids him reflect whether he, with his burning republicanism, was exactly the person most likely to obtain the much sought for patronage of Government. At last he thinks of emigration. Rousseau and Coleridge convert the scheme of emigration into the project of Pantisocracy. Here is the provision for life, and liberty, and equality. The scheme is perfect. It will be house and home—it will be philosophy put in action.

The letters of Southey are not at this time the interesting compositions which some may have expected to find them; neither do they give us much insight into the details of this great scheme (though tried on a small scale) of a community of goods. The earlier letters—say those which, immediately succeeding the autobiography, occupy the remaining part of the first volume of the work—are indeed anything but pleasing or agreeable. The editor himself speaks of them in the following manner: "His letters, which at this time seem to have been exercises in composition, give evidence of his industry, and at the same time indicate a mind imbued with heathen philosophy and Grecian republicanism. They are written often in a style of inflated declamation, which, as we shall see, before many years had passed, subsided into a more natural and tranquil tone under the influence of his matured taste." They are the letters of a clever confident youth, and quite as disagreeable as such effusions usually are; full of flippant absurd judgments on men and things, varied with that affected self-disparagement which never fails to form a conspicuous part of such compositions. Their writers are profound philosophers at one moment, and rail at philosophy the next; full of their future fame, yet despising the only occupation that they love. "I am ready," says Southey, "to quarrel with my friends for not making me a carpenter, and with myself for devoting myself to pursuits certainly unimportant, and of no real utility either to myself or to others." One gets nothing from letters of this description. Our account of Pantisocracy we must take from the words of the editor himself:—

"We have seen," he says, "that in one or two of his early letters my father speaks of emigration to America as having entered his mind; and the failure of the plans I have just mentioned now caused him to turn his thoughts more decidedly in that direction; and the result was a scheme of emigration, to which those who conceived it gave the euphonious name of 'Pantisocracy.' This idea, it appears, was first originated by Mr Coleridge and one or two of his friends; and he mentioned it to my father, on becoming acquainted with him at Oxford. Their plan was to collect as many brother adventurers as they could, and to establish a community in the New World upon the most thoroughly social basis. Land was to be purchased with their common contributions, and to be cultivated by their common labour. Each was to have his portion of work assigned him; and they calculated that a large part of their time would still remain for social converse and literary pursuits. The females of the party—for all were to be married men—were to cook, and perform all domestic affairs; and having even gone so far as to plan the architecture of their cottages, and the form of their settlement, they had pictured as pleasant a Utopia as ever entered an ardent mind."—(P. 211.)

We nowhere gather what provision was made for any other branch of industry than the agricultural. Was each man to be his own tailor, shoemaker, carpenter, &c.? Or was each Pantisocrat to train himself for one special art, to be practised for the benefit of the whole? Or were they to export raw produce, or poetry, the results of their much literary leisure, and so obtain from the old civilised countries the necessary articles for a commodious life? If the last was their plan, their colony, by still being dependent upon other countries, would lose its character as a complete experiment of a new social organisation. The projectors seem to have thought of nothing beyond the cultivation of the soil, (if they had even studied this,) and the building or the architecture of their cottages. Never surely was such a scheme of colonisation devised. Amongst the whole number of emigrants, there were only two who, apparently, had ever handled anything but books. Shad, the servant lad, and one "Heath an apothecary!" They were all students, poets, or scholars; if they had ever reached the banks of the Susquehanna, they would have found, on unpacking their boxes, that they had all brought nothing but books.

Southey having had some notions of emigrating before he became a Pantisocrat, is heard now and then to talk about the price of "blue trousers and cloth jackets;" but Coleridge had a fixed idea, that all was to be done—at least all his part was to be done—by irresistible force of argument. "Pantisocracy!" he exclaims, in a letter which is here quoted; "Oh! I shall have such a scheme of it! My head, my heart, are all alive. I have drawn up my arguments in battle array." His head and his heart! As to what hands could do, that was to be left to others. He, on the banks of the Susquehanna, would still draw up arguments in battle array. "Up I rose," he says a little further on, speaking of one who had ventured to laugh at their project, "up I rose terrible in reasoning!" We can well believe it; and if terrible reasoning would have founded a colony, he would have been the most successful of emigrants. But it is palpable that in no other way, and by no other labour, would he have assisted the new settlement. Yet when Southey, coming to his senses, relinquished the scheme, Coleridge was grievously offended. He might well, indeed, be the last to resign the project. He would have gloriously defended the little band of zealots to the latest hour of their departure; he would have stood upon the beach, and protected their retreat from every logical assailant; he would have seen the last man safely on board; and still he would have stood, and reasoned, till the vessel was out of sight; then would he have returned home, and triumphed in the great Pantisocratic settlement he had founded in America!

Very absurd, indeed, was this scheme—very like what children plan after reading Robinson Crusoe. But we must observe, that there was nothing in it worse than its folly. There was no moral obliquity. If these enthusiasts formed a perilous scheme, they took upon themselves the whole of the peril. In these days, when bold theories of social organisation are more rife than ever, it may be well to remark, that this is the only honest way to put such theories to the test of experiment. It is not fair of the speculative man to sit at home, secure of the enjoyments which the present order of things procures for him, and, from his library-table and his easy-chair, to promulgate doctrines that may be preparing the way for future revolutions of the most disastrous description. Unless he is quite sure of his speculations, such an act is of the nature of a crime. But to go forth, as Southey and Coleridge, and the rest of the fraternal band intended, to the banks of the Susquehanna, and there, unaided and uninterrupted, reduce into practice their own theories, this would be of the nature of heroism. Now, if there are a certain number of thinking intelligent men and women, who have a firm faith in the possibility of a communistic organisation of society, we should much like them to make the experiment in the manner these Pantisocrats designed, but, of course, with vastly better preparations for their undertaking. This would be fair; and the experiment, though it failed, would not be without good result. Let a certain number of such educated men and women, willing and able to work with their hands, as well as with their brains, each one previously trained to some necessary or useful handicraft, club their fortunes together. Let them purchase a track of land on the banks of the Mississippi, or wherever they think fit, and then go forth with all the necessary implements of agriculture and manufacture, and the requisite skill to use them, and abundant store of provision, and there let them put to shame, by their brilliant example of equality and fraternity, the old civilisation of mankind, founded hitherto on the law of individual property and self-reliance. Who would not wish them success? Even those who would prophesy nothing but failure for the experiment, would admire the courage and good faith of those who made it. There are few of us who would not like such an experiment to be made—by others—always presuming, that the worst result to those who embarked in it would be the blundering commencement of a new colony, which would soon mould itself on the pattern of the old societies of Europe.

But to return to the course of our biography. This visionary project, while it lasted, was not without its real results on the career and fortunes of Southey. Funds were to be raised, and therefore a poem was to be written. He composed with redoubled zeal his Joan of Arc, his first epic, and the first performance which rendered him famous in the world. It was not, however, published till after the vision of Pantisocracy had vanished into thin air. The history of its publication is well known, and how Joseph Cottle, who generously purchased the copyright, has for ever linked his name with those of Southey and Coleridge, by this and other good services rendered to the young poets, when as yet the world knew nothing of their greatness.

The next result of his project was of a more serious description. All the Pantisocrats were to be married. Whether, in Southey's case, a previous attachment was thus suddenly matured into a formal engagement, or whether he had been engaged to Miss Fricker even before this notable scheme had been set on foot, we nowhere learn. Nothing is said of the early love of the young poet—how it rose and grew and flourished. This momentous chapter of his life is summed up in the following brief sentence. It was all, we suppose, that the son knew of the matter.

"In the course of this month, (August 1794,) Mr Coleridge having returned from his excursion in Wales, came to Bristol; and my father, who was then at Bath, having gone over to meet him, introduced him to Robert Lovell, (a Pantisocrat,) through whom, it appears, they both, at this time, became known to Mr Cottle; and here also Mr Coleridge first became acquainted with his future wife, Sarah Fricker, the eldest of the three sisters, one of whom was married to Robert Lovell, the other having been engaged for some time to my father. They were the daughters of Stephen Fricker, who had carried on a large manufactory of sugar pans or moulds at Westbury, near Bristol, and who, having fallen into difficulties in consequence of the stoppage of trade by the American war, had lately died, leaving his widow and six children wholly unprovided for."

Whatever was the date or progress of the attachment, Southey was now engaged to be married. But there was one person whose opinion had not yet been consulted in all these momentous enterprises. "Hitherto," says Mr Cuthbert Southey, "all had gone on pretty smoothly; the plan of emigration, as well as my father's engagement to Mary, had been carefully concealed from his aunt Miss Tyler, who, he was perfectly aware, would most violently oppose both; and now, when at last she became acquainted with his intentions, her anger knew no bounds." In fact, she turned him instantly—though it was night, and raining hard—out of her house, and shut the door for ever upon him.

We must quote the letter in which Southey gives an account of this terrible denouement. It introduces us at once into the state of affairs, his enthusiastic project, and the associates with whom it was to be carried out. A rather different account, it will be observed, is here given of its origin, than that which we have quoted from Mr Cuthbert Southey—

"To Thomas Southey.
Bath, Oct. 19, 1794.

My Dear Brother Admiral,—Here's a row! here's a kick up! here's a pretty commence! We have had a revolution in the College Green, and I have been turned out of doors in a wet night. Lo and behold! even like my own brothers, I am penniless. It was late in the evening; the wind blew and the rain fell, and I had walked from Bath in the morning. Luckily, my father's old greatcoat was at Lovell's; I clapt it on, swallowed a glass of brandy, and set off. I met an old drunken man three miles off, and was obliged to drag him all the way to Bath, nine miles! Oh Patience, Patience! thou hast often helped poor Robert Southey, but never didst thou stand him in more need than on Friday the 17th of October 1794.

Well, Tom, here I am. My aunt has declared she will never see my face again, or open a letter of my writing. So be it. I do my duty, and will continue to do it, be the consequences what they may. You are unpleasantly situated, so is my mother, so were we all, till this grand scheme of Pantisocracy flashed upon our minds, and now all is perfectly delightful.

Open war—declared hostilities! The children are to come here on Wednesday, and I meet them at the Long Coach on this evening. My aunt abuses poor Lovell most unmercifully, and attributes the whole scheme to him: you know it was concerted between Burnett and me. But of all the whole catalogue of enormities, nothing enrages my aunt so much as my intended marriage with Mrs Lovell's sister Edith: this will hardly take place till we arrive in America; it rouses the whole army of prejudices in my aunt's breast. Pride leads the fiery host, and a pretty kick-up they must make there....

Everything is in the fairest train. Favell and Le Grice, two young Pantisocrats of nineteen, join us; they possess great genius and energy. I have seen neither of them, yet correspond with both. You may, perhaps, like this sonnet on the subject of our emigration by Favell." [We skip the sonnet. It seems to have been held sufficient testimonial for his qualifications as an emigrant.] "This is a very beautiful piece of poetry; and we may form a very fair opinion of Favell from it. Scott, a brother of your acquaintance, goes with us. So much for news relative to our private politics.

This is the age of revolutions, and a huge one we have had on the College Green. Poor Shadrack is left there, in the burning fiery furnace of her displeasure, and a prime hot berth has he got of it: he saw me depart with astonishment. 'Why, sir, you be'nt going to Bath at this time of night, and in this weather! Do let me see you sometimes, and hear from you, and send for me when you are going.'

We are all well, and all eager to depart. March will soon arrive, and I hope you will be with us before that time.

Why should the man who acts from conviction of rectitude, grieve because the prejudiced are offended? For me, I am fully possessed by the great cause to which I have devoted myself: my conduct has been open, sincere, and just; and though the world were to scorn and neglect me, I should bear their contempt with calmness. Fare thee well.

Yours in brotherly affection,
Robert Southey."

"It might have been hoped," continues the editor, "that this storm would have blown over; and that, when Pantisocracy had died a natural death, and the marriage had taken place, Miss Tyler's angry feelings might have softened down; but it was not so—the aunt and nephew never met again!"

To describe this "natural death of Pantisocracy" is hardly necessary. When the expense of a passage to America presented itself as a serious obstacle, the scene of the experiment was shifted to Wales, evidently a mere stage in the natural process of dissolution. Brought from America to Wales, the scheme looked even still more hopeless, and was finally abandoned. Mr Cuthbert Southey, in the preface to his work, says, speaking of his father—"the even tenor of his life, during its greater portion, affords but little matter for pure biography." That portion of his father's life with which he was personally acquainted, exhibited, no doubt, this even tenor; but there are few men whose lives will, upon the whole, afford more striking materials for the future biographer. He who passed the day so evenly and uniformly at Keswick, amongst his books, and with his ever-busy pen, had experienced some of the most startling vicissitudes of life, and could recall scenes in which the very strongest passions of our nature must have been called into play.

What a singular and dramatic position—how full of agitating emotions—is that which next in order reveals itself! Pantisocracy is relinquished; but he is engaged to be married. Aunt Tyler is unmitigable. What is to be done? His uncle Hill comes to the rescue. He is chaplain to the English Factory at Lisbon; is at present on a visit to England, and will shortly return. Apparently he has never interfered, by any useless remonstrances, with his nephew's proceedings; he now invites him to return with him to Lisbon. Here, at all events, is an asylum for the present; here he may enjoy an interval of quiet thought, may study Portuguese and Spanish if he will, may see a foreign country; above all, may pursue his cogitations remote from republican associates—so thinks the uncle—and from Miss Fricker. Southey accepts the invitation. But whatever may become of his political opinions, he is resolved to put it out of his power to commit any inconsistency towards Edith Fricker. As soon as the day was finally fixed for his departure, he also fixed his marriage-day. On the 14th of November 1795, he was married at Radcliffe Church, Bristol. "Immediately after the ceremony, they parted. Edith wore her wedding-ring hung round her neck, and kept her maiden name till the report of the marriage had spread abroad." Writing to his friend Bedford, he says, with truth and feeling—"Never did man stand at the altar with such strange feelings as I did. Can you, Grosvenor, by any effort of imagination, shadow out my emotion?... She returned the pressure of my hand, and we parted in silence."

We cannot look upon his conduct on this occasion in any other light than as the natural course of a noble and generous nature. There was nothing in it unfair to the uncle. The uncle had speculated on the probability that separation would weaken his attachment; but the nephew had never stipulated that it should have this effect. The uncle had also anticipated that a change of scene would cure him of his democratic politics, but this did not put the nephew under any obligation to renounce his politics, or to submit them as fully as possible to the experiment to be made on them. One motive for his hastened marriage, he tells us, was, that in the event of his death at Lisbon, or on the voyage, his widow might have some claim on the protection of his own relatives, some of whom were wealthy. But on these relatives he threw no unwarrantable burden—no burden whatever—unless such as pure generosity might feel. There was no young family to be provided for. He would have left behind him a widow, whose prospects in life could not have been injured by merely having borne his name for a few months. Southey was of a confident nature, conscious of his own great abilities, of habitual and indomitable industry. Notwithstanding some occasional and very natural fits of depression, he must have felt persuaded that, sooner or later, in one way or the other, he should secure for himself a respectable position in life. He was engaged to Edith Fricker, and he was determined she should share that position with him, and that, in the mean time, she should at all events have no other doubts or fears than what the inconstancy or perversity of fortune might suggest.

Of this, his first visit to Lisbon, very little is recorded. His mind underwent no perceptible change. We have only two letters written by him at this period to his friends in England. From the last of them, he appears to have been impatient to return. It is dated thus—"Feb. 24, 1796, Lisbon, from which God grant me a speedy deliverance!"

He returned the same man, and returned to the same perplexities. Full of his poetry, occupied incessantly with literary projects, he has not yet the courage to trust to his pen for the necessary supplies. He will enter the profession of the law. From this he will extract that needful revenue which shall one day establish him in his country house, with his Edith, and amongst books of every description—except the legal.

Here follows a chapter in his history which, we think, is one of the most instructive of the whole; certainly not the less instructive because many others have been, and many others will be, submitted to the same trials. If Southey had fulfilled his design, and completed his own biography, it is probably upon this interval, between his first and his second visit to Lisbon, that he would have thought it necessary to dwell with the greatest minuteness.

"My father," says the son, "continued to reside in Bristol until the close of the year 1796, chiefly employed in working up the contents of his foreign note-books into Letters from Spain and Portugal, which were published in one volume early in the following year. This task completed, he determined to take up his residence in London, and fairly to commence the study of the law, which he was now enabled to do through the true friendship of Mr C. W. W. Wynn, from whom he received, for some years from this time, an annuity of L.160—the prompt fulfilment of a promise made during their years of college intimacy. This was indeed one of those acts of rare friendship—twice honourable—'to him that gives and him that takes it;' bestowed with pleasure, received without any painful feelings, and often reverted to as the staff and stay of those years when otherwise he must have felt to the full all the manifold evils of being, as he himself expressed it, 'cut adrift upon the ocean of life.'"

He was fairly to commence the study of the law, but he had not the least idea of renouncing his poetical and other literary labours. If the passion of authorship had been felt by Southey only in a slight degree—if it had been a little book he wanted to write, just to "exhale his soul," and then to sober business—this scheme would have been rational enough; but authorship, with its love of fame, had become the master passion of his mind—his second nature. Of "little books" Southey never thought—all his designs were vast, and they were innumerable. His whole life was already pledged. He was then upon Madoc, with Thalaba looming in the horizon. He is writing to his friend Bedford, just before he proceeds to London to commence the study of the law; and only note the sort of impedimenta he carries up with him, and the very auspicious temper in which he enters on the campaign.

"I want to write my tragedies of 'The Banditti.'

Of 'Sebastian.'

Of 'IÑez de Castro.'

Of 'The Revenge of Pedro.'

My Epic poem, in twenty books, of 'Madoc.'

My novel, in three volumes, of 'Edmund Oliver.'

My romance of 'Ancient History of Alcas.'

My Norwegian tale of '—— Harfagne.'

My Oriental poem of 'The destruction of the Dom Daniel.'

And, in case I adopt Rousseau's system, my '—— Pains of Imagination.'

There, Grosvenor, all these I want to write....

The law will neither amuse me, nor ameliorate me, nor instruct me; but the moment it gives me a comfortable independence—and I have but few wants—then farewell to London. I will get me some little house near the sea, and near a country town, for the sake of the post and the bookseller.... And perhaps, Grosvenor, the first Christmas-day you pass with me after I am so settled, we may make a Christmas fire of all my law-books. Amen, so be it."

He goes to London, and is admitted of Gray's Inn, Feb. 7, 1797. A few days afterwards, he writes in a graver mood to his early and staunch friend Joseph Cottle.

"I am now entered on a new way of life, which will lead me to independence. You know that I neither lightly undertake any scheme, nor lightly abandon what I have undertaken....

As to my literary pursuits, after some consideration, I have resolved to postpone every other till I have concluded Madoc. This must be the greatest of all my works. The structure is complete in my mind; and my mind is likewise stored with appropriate images....

On Tuesday we shall be settled; and on Wednesday my legal studies begin in the morning, and I shall begin with Madoc in the evening. Of this it is needless to caution you to say nothing, as I must have the character of a lawyer; and though I can and will unite the two pursuits, no one would credit the possibility of the union."

What follows shows, nevertheless, the folly of attempting to combine things utterly incongruous, and the mischief that may ensue from the attempt. It was very little that Southey could have studied the law, but the effort to force his attention to one subject, while his mind was really absorbed in another, and the perpetually intruding and distracting thought that he ought to be studying the law, was very nearly ruining his health irretrievably, and converting one of the most buoyant hilarious of men into the confirmed hypochondriac.

It was in February he came to London. The spring no sooner appeared than he began to pine for the country; he felt his spirits exhausted; he thought his legal studies could be as well pursued at the sea-side as in the smoke of London; he goes to Burton in Hampshire. There, or elsewhere in the country, he spends the whole summer. In December he returns to London, but "remains there only a very short time." He takes a cottage in the pretty village of Westbury, there to prosecute his legal studies. He stays a twelve-month at Westbury; nor does he again return to London to reside. He had attributed his ill-health to the smoke and confinement of the metropolis, but it is after his escape from London that his health becomes seriously deranged. He had not escaped from his legal studies, or rather from the sense of obligation constantly impending over him to pursue them, and the occasional attempts to compel his attention to the repulsive task.

The law cannot be accused of having encroached seriously on time that would have been else devoted to literature. He took long vacations, when the hated text-book and the detestable reports were banished entirely from his mind. Speaking of his residence at Westbury, he says, "it was one of the happiest portions of his life: he had never before or since produced so much poetry in the same space of time." But still the profession hung over him, urging, from time to time, its distracting obligations. Having escaped from the smoke of London, he now attributes his shattered nerves to the climate of England. But it was as little the climate of England, which his constitution afterwards endured very well in the cold and rainy regions of Cumberland, as it was any fair amount of intellectual labour, that was undermining his health. It was the sense of an unperformed task, and that compulsory and distracted attention, one half hour of which more tries and fatigues the brain than a whole morning spent in willing harmonious effort.

Bearing these observations in mind, the following letter will be read with peculiar interest:—

"TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD, ESQ.
Kingsdown, Bristol,
Dec. 21, 1799.

Grosvenor—I think seriously of going abroad. My complaint—so I am told by the opinion of many medical men—is wholly a diseased sensibility, (mind you, physical sensibility,) disordering the functions, now of the heart, now of the intestines, and gradually debilitating me. Climate is the obvious remedy. In my present state, to attempt to undergo the confinement of legal application were actual suicide. I am anxious to be well, and to attempt the profession: much in it I shall never do: sometimes my principles stand in the way, sometimes the want of readiness, which I felt from the first—a want which I always know in company, and never in solitude and silence. Howbeit I will make the attempt; but mark you, if by stage-writing, or any other writing, I can acquire independence, I will not make the sacrifice of happiness it will inevitably cost me. I love the country, I love study—devotedly I love it; but in legal studies it is only the subtlety of the mind that is exercised.

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I am not indolent; I loath indolence; but, indeed, reading law is laborious indolence—it is thrashing straw. I have read, and read, and read; but the devil a bit can I remember. I have given all possible attention, and attempted to command volition. No! The eye read, the lips pronounced, I understood and re-read it; it was very clear; I remembered the page, the sentence—but close the book, and all was gone!

I suffer a good deal from illness, and in a way hardly understandable by those in health. I start from sleep as if death had seized me. I am sensible of every pulsation, and compelled to attend to the motion of my heart till that attention disturbs it. The pain in my side is, I think, lessened, nor do I at all think it is consumption: organic affection it could not have been, else it had been constant; and a heart disease would not have been perceived there. I must go abroad, and recruit under better skies."—(Vol. ii. p. 33.)

He reads and reads, and he comprehends, but he does not remember. It would have been marvellous if he did, reading always with a divided attention. He never could bring all his mind to this task. "I would rather," he says in one place, "write an epic poem than read a brief." And in the most self-congratulatory moment, when he is the most reconciled, or in the least bad humour with the law, he writes thus: "I advance with sufficient rapidity. Blackstone and Madoc! I hope to finish my poem and begin my practice in about two years. I am clearing a farm; I am painting a landscape that shall rival Claude Lorraine!"

Southey had resolved to be poet and lawyer both. If he had really delighted in both studies—as Sir William Jones seems to have done—he might, like Sir William, have attained a certain degree of excellence in both. We have a living example before us of a judge who has written a far more beautiful poem than half-a-dozen Sir Williams could have indited. But with Southey one of these studies was not only indifferent but intolerable, whilst the other was most delectable. Under these circumstances, the attempt to unite them was ruining one of the best constitutions that a student was ever blest with by nature. We have no doubt that, if he had much longer seriously persisted in this attempt, there would have been a general wreck and ruin of mind and body both.

"My health," he says, writing to Mr May, "fluctuates, and the necessity of changing climate is sadly and sufficiently obvious, lest, though my disease should prove of no serious danger, the worst habits of hypochondriasm fasten upon me, and palsy all intellectual power." He took the wisest resolution the circumstances of the case admitted of—he embarked for Lisbon. He threw off entirely—at all events for a season, perhaps, in secret, for ever—the anxious burden of the law. He gave his whole soul to poetry; rode about in the paradise of Cintra, and wrote the concluding books of his Thalaba. So was he rescued from the fate of a nervous hypochondriac patient.

It is a piece of advice we would give to every man, but especially to the student. Harmonise your labours. If ambition prompt you to mingle two conflicting studies that will not accord, that breed perpetual civil war in the mind, we charge you to fling away ambition. If the higher, and more ambitious, and more beloved study—be it science, or poetry, or philosophy—will not yield, then choose at once for it and poverty, if such must be the alternative. Better anything than a ruined disordered mind; or, if you prefer the expression, than a confirmed cerebral disease.

Very pleasant was the life that Southey led at Lisbon and at Cintra, and very agreeable are the letters that he writes to England during this second visit to the Peninsula.

"You would be amused," he says in one of them, "could you see Edith and myself on ass-back—I sitting sideways, gloriously lazy, with a boy to beat my Bayardo, as well adapted to me as ever that wild courser was to Rinaldo. In this climate there is no walking, a little exercise heats so immoderately; but their cork woods, or fir woods, and mountain glens, and rock pyramids, and ever-flowing fountains, and lemon-groves ever in flower and in fruit, want only society to become a paradise. Could I but colonise Cintra with half-a-dozen families, I should never wish to leave it. As it is, I am comfortable, my health establishing itself, my spirits everlastingly partaking the sunshine of the climate. Yet I do hunger after the bread-and-butter, and the fireside comforts, and the intellect of England."—(Vol. ii. p. 109.)

On his return to England we hear no more of the law, or we hear only that it was entirely abandoned. We find him writing to Bedford (p. 159) about one solitary remaining law-book—"my whole proper stock—whom I design to take up to the top of Mount Etna, for the express purpose of throwing him down straight to the devil."

His sojourn in the Continent had led him to think that some foreign consulship would not be unacceptable. No appointment of this kind, however, offered itself. That of private secretary to Mr Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, was proposed to him, and he accepted it. "This had been brought about," says the Editor, "through his friend Mr Rickman, who was at that time secretary to Mr Abbot, and in consequence residing in Dublin—an additional inducement to my father to accept the appointment, as he would have to reside there himself during half the year."

He went to Dublin to take possession of his new office, but soon after returned to London, where the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer was in the habit of residing during the winter portion of the year. Mr Corry is described as a man of mild unassuming manners; and "the Chancellor and his scribe" got on very well together. But the Chancellor discovered that he had nothing to do for his very clever secretary. Having no sufficient official employment, he proposed to him to undertake the tuition of his son. This "was not in the bond," nor at all suited to Southey's habits and inclinations. To use his own words, he therefore resigned "a foolish office, and a good salary."

This was the last serious attempt he made to obtain the necessary supplies from any other source than his pen. He betook himself steadily to reviewing and other literary work. The Annual Register offered him constant employment till the Quarterly was established. For his residence, he thought first of Richmond, on the Thames; then of the Valley of Neath in Wales; finally, he established himself at Keswick.

We have thus brought down his biography to the period when, his political opinions considerably modified, and his literary avocations clearly defined before him, he takes up his residence at that place which will for ever be associated with his name, and assumes that character and position in which he was so long known and honoured by his contemporaries. Before leaving England, on his second voyage to Lisbon, he had written Madoc, (that is, in its rough state,) and had composed the greater part of Thalaba. The concluding books of Thalaba—that charming episode of Laila—were written amongst the hills and the cork forests of Cintra. The completed manuscript was sent to England, and was published soon after his own return. Madoc there received its last corrections and additions. The time is now come when we can take a glance at these and other poetical works, which were, and still are, the basis of his fame. The author is now himself moored safely in still waters, and his life henceforth is little more than the history of his writings, of his mind, his opinions, and his acts of beneficence; for these last occupy no small space in it. No relative can put in a claim to his assistance but it is granted to the utmost of his power, and often beyond such restrictions as prudence, and a regard to nearer claims, would suggest. He is open to the very enthusiasm of friendship, and prepared for any self-sacrifice that the most romantic sense of duty can demand. Nor is there any young poet struggling with that world which his love of letters has made appear so harsh and cruel, to whom Southey does not extend his sympathy, his guidance, and his aid. But as the remaining portion of our task would occupy more space than we could assign to it, and as we have arrived at a fair halting-place, we will here break off for the present.

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