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English Men of Letters
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY
SOUTHEY
BY
EDWARD DOWDEN
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NOTE.
I am indebted throughout to _The Life and Correspondence of Robert
Southey_, edited by the Rev. C. C. Southey, six volumes, 1850, and to
_Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey_, edited by J. W. Warter,
B.D., four volumes, 1856. Many other sources have been consulted. I thank
Mr. W. J. Craig for help given in examining Southey manuscripts, and Mr.
T. W. Lyster for many valuable suggestions.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
CHILDHOOD 1
CHAPTER II.
WESTMINSTER, OXFORD, PANTISOCRACY, AND MARRIAGE 19
CHAPTER III.
WANDERINGS, 1795-1803 44
CHAPTER IV.
WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803-1839 80
CHAPTER V.
WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803-1839 (_continued_) 112
CHAPTER VI.
CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803-1843 142
CHAPTER VII.
SOUTHEY’S WORK IN LITERATURE 187
SOUTHEY.
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD.
No one of his generation lived so completely in and for literature as did
Southey. “He is,” said Byron, “the only existing entire man of letters.”
With him literature served the needs both of the material life and of
the life of the intellect and imagination; it was his means of earning
daily bread, and also the means of satisfying his highest ambitions and
desires. This, which was true of Southey at five-and-twenty years of age,
was equally true at forty, fifty, sixty. During all that time he was
actively at work accumulating, arranging, and distributing knowledge; no
one among his contemporaries gathered so large a store from the records
of the past; no one toiled with such steadfast devotion to enrich his
age; no one occupied so honourable a place in so many provinces of
literature. There is not, perhaps, any single work of Southey’s the loss
of which would be felt by us as a capital misfortune. But the more we
consider his total work, its mass, its variety, its high excellence, the
more we come to regard it as a memorable, an extraordinary achievement.
Southey himself, however, stands above his works. In subject they are
disconnected, and some of them appear like huge fragments. It is the
presence of one mind, one character in all, easily recognizable by him
who knows Southey, which gives them a vital unity. We could lose the
_History of Brazil_, or the _Peninsular War_, or the _Life of Wesley_,
and feel that if our possessions were diminished, we ourselves in our
inmost being had undergone no loss which might not easily be endured. But
he who has once come to know Southey’s voice as the voice of a friend,
so clear, so brave, so honest, so full of boyish glee, so full of manly
tenderness, feels that if he heard that voice no more a portion of his
life were gone. To make acquaintance with the man is better than to study
the subjects of his books. In such a memoir as the present, to glance
over the contents of a hundred volumes, dealing with matters widely
remote, would be to wander upon a vast circumference when we ought to
strike for the centre. If the reader come to know Southey as he read and
wrote in his library, as he rejoiced and sorrowed among his children, as
he held hands with good old friends, as he walked by the lake-side, or
lingered to muse near some mountain stream, as he hoped and feared for
England, as he thought of life and death and a future beyond the grave,
the end of this small book will have been attained.
At the age of forty-six Robert Southey wrote the first of a series
of autobiographic sketches; his spirit was courageous, and life had
been good to him; but it needed more than his courage to live again
in remembrance with so many of the dead; having told the story of his
boyhood, he had not the heart to go farther. The autobiography rambles
pleasantly into by-ways of old Bath and Bristol life; at Westminster
School it leaves him. So far we shall go along with it; for what lies
beyond, a record of Southey’s career must be brought together from a
multitude of letters, published or still remaining in manuscript, and
from many and massy volumes in prose and verse, which show how the
industrious hours sped by.
Southey’s father was a linen-draper of Bristol. He had left his native
fields under the Quantock hills to take service in a London shop, but
his heart suffered in its exile. The tears were in his eyes one day when
a porter went by carrying a hare, and the remembrance suddenly came to
him of his rural sports. On his master’s death he took a place behind
the counter of Britton’s shop in Wine Street, Bristol; and when, twelve
years later, he opened a shop for himself in the same business, he had,
with tender reminiscence, a hare painted for a device upon his windows.
He kept his grandfather’s sword which had been borne in Monmouth’s
rebellion; he loved the chimes and quarter-boys of Christ Church,
Bristol, and tried, as church-warden, to preserve them. What else of
poetry there may have been in the life of Robert Southey the elder is
lost among the buried epics of prosaic lives. We cannot suppose that as a
man of business he was sharp and shrewd; he certainly was not successful.
When the draper’s work was done, he whiled away the hours over Felix
Farley’s Bristol Journal, his only reading. For library some score
of books shared with his wine-glasses the small cupboard in the back
parlour; its chief treasures were the _Spectator_, the _Guardian_, some
eighteenth-century poems, dead even then, and one or two immortal plays.
On Sundays Mr. Southey, then a bachelor, would stroll to Bedminster to
dine at the pleasant house of Mrs. Hill—a substantial house to which
Edward Hill, gentleman, brought his second wife, herself a widow; a house
rich in old English comfort, with its diamond-tiled garden-way and
jessamine-covered porch, its wainscoted “best kitchen,” its blue room and
green room and yellow room, its grapes and greengages and nectarines, its
sweet-williams and stocks and syringas. Among these pleasant surroundings
the young draper found it natural, on Sabbath afternoons, to make love to
pleasant Margaret Hill. “Never,” writes her son Robert Southey—“never was
any human being blessed with a sweeter temper or a happier disposition.”
Her face had been marred by the seams of small-pox, but its brightness
and kindness remained; there was a charm in her clear hazel eyes, so good
a temper and so alert an understanding were to be read in them. She had
not gone to any school except one for dancing, and “her state,” declares
Southey, “was the more gracious;” her father had, however, given her
lessons in the art of whistling; she could turn a tune like a blackbird.
From a mother, able to see a fact swiftly and surely, and who knew both
to whistle and to dance, Southey inherited that alertness of intellect
and that joyous temper, without which he could not have accomplished his
huge task-work, never yielding to a mood of rebellion or _ennui_.
After the courtship on Sunday afternoons came the wedding, and before
long a beautiful boy was born, who died in infancy. On the 12th of
August, 1774, Mrs. Southey was again in the pain of childbirth. “Is it a
boy?” she asked the nurse. “Ay, a great ugly boy!” With such salutation
from his earliest critic the future poet-laureate entered this world.
“God forgive me,” his mother exclaimed afterwards, in relating the
event, “when I saw what a great red creature it was, covered with rolls
of fat, I thought I should never be able to love him.” In due time the
red creature proved to be a distinctively human child, whose curly
hair and sensitive feelings made him a mother’s darling. He had not yet
heard of sentiment or of Rousseau, but he wept at the pathos of romantic
literature, at the tragic fate of the “Children sliding on the ice all
on a summer’s day,” or the too early death of “Billy Pringle’s pig,” and
he would beg the reciters not to proceed. His mother’s household cares
multiplied, and Southey, an unbreeched boy of three years, was borne away
one morning by his faithful foster-mother Patty to be handed over to
the tender mercies of a schoolmistress. Ma’am Powell was old and grim,
and with her lashless eyes gorgonized the new pupil; on the seizure of
her hand he woke to rebellion, kicking lustily, and crying, “Take me to
Pat! I don’t like ye! you’ve got ugly eyes! take me to Pat, I say!” But
soft-hearted Pat had gone home, sobbing.
Mrs. Southey’s one weakness was that of submitting too meekly to the
tyranny of an imperious half-sister, Miss Tyler, the daughter of
Grandmother Hill by her first marriage. For this weakness there were
excuses; Miss Tyler was an elder sister by many years; she had property
of her own; she passed for a person of fashion, and was still held to be
a beauty; above all, she had the advantage of a temper so capricious and
violent that to quarrel with her at all might be to lose her sisterly
regard for ever. Her struggling sister’s eldest son took Aunt Tyler’s
fancy; it was a part of her imperious kindness to adopt or half-adopt
the boy. Aunt Tyler lived in Bath; in no other city could a gentlewoman
better preserve health and good looks, or enjoy so much society of
distinction on easy but not too ample means; it possessed a charming
theatre, and Miss Tyler was a patron of the drama. To Bath, then, she
had brought her portrait by Gainsborough, her inlaid cabinet of ebony,
her cherry-wood arm-chair, her mezzotints after Angelica Kaufmann, her
old-maid hoards of this and of that, the woman servant she had saved
from the toils of matrimony, and the old man, harmless as one of the
crickets which he nightly fed until he died. To Bath Miss Tyler also
brought her nephew; and she purchased a copy of the new gospel of
education, Rousseau’s _Emilius_, in order to ascertain how Nature should
have her perfect work with a boy in petticoats. Here the little victim,
without companions, without play, without the child’s beatitudes of
dirt and din, was carefully swathed in the odds and ends of habits and
humours which belonged to a maiden lady of a whimsical, irrational,
and self-indulgent temper. Miss Tyler, when not prepared for company,
wandered about the house—a faded beauty—in the most faded and fluttering
of costumes; but in her rags she was spotless. To preserve herself and
her worldly gear from the dust, for ever floating and gathering in this
our sordid atmosphere, was the business of her life. Her acquaintances
she divided into the clean and the unclean—the latter class being much
the more numerous. Did one of the unclean take a seat in her best room,
the infected chair must be removed to the garden to be aired. But did
he seat himself in Miss Tyler’s own arm-chair, pressing his abominable
person into Miss Tyler’s own cushion, then passionate were her dismay
and despair. To her favourites she was gracious and high-bred, regaling
them with reminiscences of Lady Bateman, and with her views on taste,
Shakspeare, and the musical glasses. For her little nephew she invented
the pretty recreation of pricking play-bills; all capital letters
were to be illuminated with pin-holes; it was not a boisterous nor an
ungenteel sport. At other times the boy would beguile the hours in the
garden, making friends with flowers and insects, or looking wistfully
towards that sham castle on Claverton Hill, seat of romantic mystery,
but, alas! two miles away, and therefore beyond the climbing powers of
a refined gentlewoman. Southey’s hardest daily trial was the luxurious
morning captivity of his aunt’s bed; still at nine, at ten that lady lay
in slumber; the small urchin, long perked up and broad awake, feared by
sound or stir to rouse her, and would nearly wear his little wits away in
plotting re-arrangements of the curtain-pattern, or studying the motes at
mazy play in the slant sunbeam. His happiest season was when all other
little boys were fast asleep; then, splendid in his gayest “jam,” he
sat beside Miss Tyler in a front row of the best part of the theatre;
when the yawning fits had passed, he was as open-eyed as the oldest, and
stared on, filling his soul with the spectacle, till the curtain fell.
The “great red creature,” Robert Southey, had now grown into the lean
greyhound of his after-life; his long legs wanted to be stirring, and
there were childish ambitions already at work in his head. Freedom became
dearer to him than the daintiest cage, and when at six he returned to
his father’s house in Wine Street, it was with rejoicing. Now, too, his
aunt issued an edict that the long-legged lad should be breeched; an
epoch of life was complete. Wine Street, with its freedom, seemed good;
but best of all was a visit to Grandmother Hill’s pleasant house at
Bedminster. “Here I had all wholesome liberty, all wholesome indulgence,
all wholesome enjoyments; and the delight which I there learnt to take
in rural sights and sounds has grown up with me, and continues unabated
to this day.” And now that scrambling process called education was to
begin. A year was spent by Southey as a day-scholar with old Mr. Foot, a
dissenting minister, whose unorthodoxy as to the doctrine of the Trinity
was in some measure compensated by sound traditional views as to the uses
of the cane. Mr. Foot, having given proof on the back of his last and his
least pupil of steadfastness in the faith according to Busby, died; and
it was decided that the boy should be placed under Thomas Flower, who
kept school at Corston, nine miles from Bristol. To a tender mother’s
heart nine miles seemed a breadth of severance cruel as an Atlantic. Mrs.
Southey, born to be happy herself, and to make others happy, had always
heretofore met her son with a smile; now he found her weeping in her
chamber; with an effort, such as Southey, man and boy, always knew how to
make on like occasions, he gulped down his own rising sob, and tried to
brighten her sorrow with a smile.
A boy’s first night at school is usually not a time of mirth. The heart
of the solitary little lad at Corston sank within him. A melancholy hung
about the decayed mansion which had once known better days; the broken
gateways, the summer-houses falling in ruins, the grass-grown court,
the bleakness of the schoolroom, ill-disguised by its faded tapestry,
depressed the spirits. Southey’s pillow was wet with tears before he
fell asleep. The master was at one with his surroundings; he, too, was
a piece of worthy old humanity now decayed; he, too, was falling in
untimely ruins. From the memory of happier days, from the troubles of
his broken fortune, from the vexations of the drunken maid-servant who
was now his wife, he took refuge in contemplating the order and motions
of the stars. “When he came into his desk, even there he was thinking of
the stars, and looked as if he were out of humour, not from ill-nature,
but because his calculations were interrupted.” Naturally the work of
the school, such as it was, fell, for the most part, into the hands
of Charley, Thomas Flower’s son. Both father and son knew the mystery
of that flamboyant penmanship admired by our ancestors, but Southey’s
handwriting had not yet advanced from the early rounded to the decorated
style. His spelling he could look back upon with pride: on one occasion
a grand spelling tournament between the boys took place; and little
Southey can hardly have failed to overthrow his taller adversaries with
the posers, “crystallization” and “coterie.” The household arrangements
at Corston, as may be supposed, were not of the most perfect kind; Mrs.
Flower had so deep an interest in her bottle, and poor Thomas Flower in
his planets. The boys each morning washed themselves, or did not, in
the brook ankle-deep which ran through the yard. In autumn the brook
grew deeper and more swift, and after a gale it would bring within
bounds a tribute of floating apples from the neighbouring orchard. That
was a merry day, also in autumn, when the boys were employed to pelt
the master’s walnut-trees; Southey, too small to bear his part in the
battery, would glean among the fallen leaves and twigs, inhaling the
penetrating fragrance which ever after called up a vision of the brook,
the hillside, and its trees. One schoolboy sport—that of “conquering”
with snail-shells—seems to have been the special invention of Corston.
The snail-shells, not tenantless, were pressed point against point
until one was broken in. A great conqueror was prodigiously prized, was
treated with honourable distinction, and was not exposed to danger save
in great emergencies. One who had slain his hundreds might rank with
Rodney, to see whom the boys had marched down to the Globe inn, and for
whom they had cheered and waved their Sunday cocked hats as he passed
by. So, on the whole, life at Corston had its pleasures. Chief among
its pains was the misery of Sunday evenings in winter; then the pupils
were assembled in the hall to hear the master read a sermon, or a portion
of Stackhouse’s _History of the Bible_. “Here,” writes Southey, “I sat
at the end of a long form, in sight but not within feeling of the fire,
my feet cold, my eyelids heavy as lead, and yet not daring to close
them—kept awake by fear alone, in total inaction, and under the operation
of a lecture more soporific than the strongest sleeping dose.” While the
boys’ souls were thus provided for, there was a certain negligence in
matters unspiritual; an alarm got abroad that infection was among them.
This hastened the downfall of the school. One night disputing was heard
between Charley and his father; in the morning poor Flower was not to be
seen, and Charley appeared with a black eye. So came to an end the year
at Corston. Southey, aged eight, was brought home, and underwent “a three
days’ purgatory in brimstone.”[1]
What Southey had gained of book-lore by his two years’ schooling was
as little as could be; but he was already a lover of literature after
a fashion of his own. A friend of Miss Tyler had presented him, as
soon as he could read, with a series of Newbery’s sixpenny books for
children—_Goody Twoshoes_, _Giles Gingerbread_, and the rest—delectable
histories, resplendent in Dutch-gilt paper. The true masters of his
imagination, however, were the players and playwrights who provided
amusement for the pleasure-loving people of Bath. Miss Tyler was
acquainted with Colman, and Sheridan, and Cumberland, and Holcroft; her
talk was of actors and authors, and her nephew soon perceived that,
honoured as were both classes, the authors were awarded the higher place.
His first dreams of literary fame, accordingly, were connected with the
drama. “‘It is the easiest thing in the world to write a play,’ said I
to Miss Palmer (a friend of Aunt Tyler’s), as we were in a carriage on
Redcliffe Hill one day, returning from Bristol to Bedminster. ‘Is it, my
dear?’ was her reply. ‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘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.’” With such a canon of dramatic authorship Southey
began a play on the continence of Scipio, and actually completed an act
and a half. Shakespeare he read and read again; Beaumont and Fletcher
he had gone through before he was eight years old. Were they not great
theatrical names, Miss Tyler reasoned, and therefore improving writers
for her nephew? and Southey had read them unharmed. When he visited his
aunt from Corston, she was a guest with Miss Palmer at Bath; a covered
passage led to the playhouse, and every evening the delighted child,
seated between the two lady-patronesses of the stage, saw the pageantry
and heard the poetry. A little later he persuaded a schoolfellow to write
a tragedy; Ballard liked the suggestion, but could not invent a plot.
Southey gave him a story; Ballard approved, but found a difficulty in
devising names for the _dramatis personæ_. Southey supplied a list of
heroic names: they were just what Ballard wanted—but he was at a loss to
know what the characters should say. “I made the same attempt,” continued
Southey, “with another schoolfellow, and with no better success. It
seemed to me very odd that they should not be able to write plays as well
as to do their lessons.”
The ingenious Ballard was an ornament of the school of William Williams,
whither Southey was sent as a day-boarder after the catastrophe of
Corston. Under the care of this kindly, irascible, little, bewigged old
Welshman, Southey remained during four years. Williams was not a model
schoolmaster, but he was a man of character and of a certain humorous
originality. In two things he believed with all the energy of his
nature—in his own spelling-book printed for his own school, and in the
Church Catechism. Latin was left to the curate; when Southey reached
Virgil, old Williams, delighted with classical attainments rare among
his pupils, thought of taking the boy into his own hands, but his little
Latin had faded from his brain; and the curate himself seemed to have
reached his term in the _Tityre tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi_,
so that to Southey, driven round and round the pastoral paddock, the
names of Tityrus and Melibœus became for ever after symbols of _ennui_.
No prosody was taught: “I am,” said Southey, “at this day as liable to
make a false quantity as any Scotchman.” The credit, however, is due
to Williams of having discovered in his favourite pupil a writer of
English prose. One day each boy of a certain standing was called upon
to write a letter on any subject he pleased: never had Southey written
a letter except the formal one dictated at Corston which began with
“Honoured Parents.” He cried for perplexity and vexation; but Williams
encouraged him, and presently a description of Stonehenge filled his
slate. The old man was surprised and delighted. A less amiable feeling
possessed Southey’s schoolfellows: a plan was forthwith laid for his
humiliation—could he tell them, fine scholar that he was, what the
letters _i. e._ stand for? Southey, never lacking in courage, drew a bow
at a venture: for John the Evangelist.
The old Welshman, an original himself, had an odd following of friends
and poor retainers. There was the crazy rhymester known as “Dr. Jones;”
tradition darkly related that a dose of cantharides administered by
waggish boys of a former generation had robbed him of his wits. “The most
celebrated _improvisatore_ was never half so vain of his talent as this
queer creature, whose little figure of some five-feet-two I can perfectly
call to mind, with his suit of rusty black, his more rusty wig, and his
old cocked hat. Whenever he entered the schoolroom he was greeted with a
shout of welcome.” There was also Pullen, the breeches-maker—a glorious
fellow, brimful of vulgarity, prosperity, and boisterous good-nature;
above all, an excellent hand at demanding a half-holiday. A more graceful
presence, but a more fleeting, was that of Mrs. Estan, the actress, who
came to learn from the dancing-master her _minuet de la cour_ in _The
Belle’s Stratagem_. Southey himself had to submit to lessons in dancing.
Tom Madge, his constant partner, had limbs that went every way; Southey’s
limbs would go no way: the spectacle presented by their joint endeavours
was one designed for the pencil of Cruikshank. In the art of reading
aloud Miss Tyler had herself instructed her nephew, probably after the
manner of the most approved tragedy queens. The grand style did not
please honest Williams. “Who taught you to read?” he asked, scornfully.
“My aunt,” answered Southey. “Then give my compliments to your aunt, and
tell her that my old horse, that has been dead these twenty years, could
have taught you as well”—a message which her nephew, with the appalling
frankness of youth, delivered, and which was never forgotten.
While Southey was at Corston, his grandmother died; the old lady with the
large, clear, brown, bright eyes, seated in her garden, was no more to be
seen, and the Bedminster house, after a brief occupation by Miss Tyler,
was sold. Miss Tyler spoke of Bristol society with a disdainful sniff;
it was her choice to wander for a while from one genteel watering-place
to another. When Williams gave Southey his first summer holidays, he
visited his aunt at Weymouth. The hours spent there upon the beach were
the most spiritual hours of Southey’s boyhood; he was for the first
time in face of the sea—the sea vast, voiceful, and mysterious. Another
epoch-making event occurred about the same time; good Mrs. Dolignon, his
aunt’s friend, gave him a book—the first which became his very own since
that present of the toy-books of Newbery. It was Hoole’s translation of
Tasso’s _Gerusalemme Liberata_; in it a world of poetical adventure was
opened to the boy. The notes to Tasso made frequent reference to Ariosto;
Bull’s Circulating Library at Bath—a Bodleian to Southey—supplied him
with the version, also by Hoole, of the _Orlando Furioso_; here was a
forest of old romance in which to lose himself. But a greater discovery
was to come; searching the notes again, Southey found mention made of
Spenser, and certain stanzas of Spenser’s chief poem were quoted. “Was
the _Faerie Queene_ on Bull’s shelves?” “Yes,” was the answer; “they
had it, but it was in obsolete language, and the young gentleman would
not understand it.” The young gentleman, who had already gone through
Beaumont and Fletcher, was not daunted; he fell to with the keenest
relish, feeling in Spenser the presence of something which was lacking in
the monotonous couplets of Hoole, and charming himself unaware with the
music of the stanza. Spenser, “not more sweet than pure, and not more
pure than wise,”
“High-priest of all the Muses’ mysteries,”[2]
was henceforth accepted by Southey as his master.
When Miss Tyler had exhausted her friends’ hospitality, and had grown
tired of lodgings, she settled in a pleasant suburban nook at Bristol;
but having a standing quarrel with Thomas Southey, her sister’s
brother-in-law, she would never set foot in the house in Wine Street,
and she tried to estrange her nephew, as far as possible, from his
natural home. Her own brother William, a half-witted creature, she
brought to live with her. “The Squire,” as he was called, was hardly
a responsible being, yet he had a sort of _half-saved_ shrewdness,
and a memory stored with old saws, which, says Southey, “would have
qualified him, had he been born two centuries earlier, to have worn
motley, and figured with a cap and bells and a bauble in some baron’s
hall.” A saying of his, “Curses are like young chickens, they always
come home to roost,” was remembered by Southey in after-years; and when
it was turned into Greek by Coleridge, to serve as motto to _The Curse
of Kehama_, a mysterious reference was given—Αποφθ. Ανεκ. του Γυλίελ.
του Μητ. With much beer-swilling and tobacco-chewing, premature old age
came upon him. He would sit for hours by the kitchen fire, or, on warm
days, in the summer-house, his eyes intently following the movements of
the neighbours. He loved to play at marbles with his nephew, and at loo
with Miss Tyler; most of all, he loved to be taken to the theatre. The
poor Squire had an affectionate heart; he would fondle children with
tenderness, and at his mother’s funeral his grief was overwhelming.
A companion of his own age Southey found in Shadrach Weekes, the boy
of all work, a brother of Miss Tyler’s maid. Shad and his young master
would scour the country in search of violet and cowslip roots, and the
bee and fly orchis, until wood and rock by the side of the Avon had
grown familiar and had grown dear; and now, instead of solitary pricking
of play-bills, Southey set to work, with the help of Shad, to make and
fit up such a theatre for puppets as would have been the pride even of
Wilhelm Meister.
But fate had already pronounced that Southey was to be poet, and not
player. Tasso and Ariosto and Spenser claimed him, or so he dreamed. By
this time he had added to his epic cycle Pope’s _Homer_ and Mickle’s
_Lusiad_. That prose romance, embroidered with sixteenth-century
affectations, but with a true chivalric sentiment at its heart, Sidney’s
_Arcadia_, was also known to him. He had read Arabian and mock-Arabian
tales; he had spent the pocket-money of many weeks on a Josephus, and he
had picked up from Goldsmith something of Greek and Roman history. So
breathed upon by poetry, and so furnished with erudition, Southey, at
twelve years old, found it the most natural thing in the world to become
an epic poet. His removal from the old Welshman’s school having been
hastened by that terrible message which Miss Tyler could not forgive,
Southey, before proceeding to Westminster, was placed for a year under a
clergyman, believed to be competent to carry his pupils beyond Tityrus
and Melibœus. But, except some skill in writing English themes, little
was gained from this new tutor. The year, however, was not lost. “I do
not remember,” Southey writes, “in any part of my life to have been so
conscious of intellectual improvement ... an improvement derived not
from books or instruction, but from constantly exercising myself in
English verse.” “Arcadia” was the title of his first dream-poem; it was
to be grafted upon the _Orlando Furioso_, with a new hero, and in a new
scene; this dated from his ninth or tenth year, and some verses were
actually composed. The epic of the Trojan Brutus and that of King Richard
III. were soon laid aside, but several folio sheets of an _Egbert_ came
to be written. The boy’s pride and ambition were solitary and shy. One
day he found a lady, a visitor of Miss Tyler’s, with the sacred sheets of
_Egbert_ in her hand; her compliments on his poem were deeply resented;
and he determined henceforth to write his epics in a private cipher.
Heroic epistles, translations from Latin poetry, satires, descriptive and
moral pieces, a poem in dialogue exhibiting the story of the Trojan war,
followed in rapid succession; last, a “Cassibelan,” of which three books
were completed. Southey, looking back on these attempts, notices their
deficiency in plan, in construction. “It was long before I acquired this
power—not fairly, indeed, till I was about five or six and thirty; and
it was gained by practice, in the course of which I learnt to perceive
wherein I was deficient.”
One day in February, 1788, a carriage rumbled out of Bath, containing
Miss Palmer, Miss Tyler, and Robert Southey, now a tall, lank boy
with high-poised head, brown curling hair, bright hazel eyes, and an
expression of ardour and energy about the lips and chin. The ladies were
on their way to London for some weeks’ diversion, and Robert Southey
was on his way to school at Westminster. For a while he remained an
inconvenient appendage of his aunt’s, wearying of the great city, longing
for Shad and the carpentry, and the Gloucester meadows and the Avon
cliffs, and the honest eyes and joyous bark of poor Phillis. April the
first—ominous morning—arrived; Southey was driven to Dean’s Yard; his
name was duly entered; his boarding-house determined; his tutor chosen;
farewells were said, and he found himself in a strange world, alone.