The

Have you seen the Maviad? poem is not equal to the former production of the same author, but the spirit of panegyric is more agreeable than that of satire, and I love the man for his lines to his own friends; there is an imitation of Otium Divos, very eminently beautiful. Merry has been satirised too much, and praised too much. . . .

I am in hopes that the absurd fashion of wearing powder has received its deathblow; the scarcity we are threatened with (and of which we have as yet experienced only a very slight earnest) renders it now highly criminal. I am glad you are without it.

God bless you!

.

ROBERT SOUTHEY. When the day was fixed for the voyage, Southey named it for that of his own marriage; and on the 14th of November, 1795, he was united to Edith Fricker at Bristol, in Radclift Church. They parted at the doors, and Mrs. Southey wore her weddingring round her neck, and retained her maiden name until the marriage become known. 'Never,' he said, 'did man stand at the altar with such strange feelings as I did.' One of his motives was highly honourable to him. He wished to protect the lady of his affections from the mortification of receiving assistance from one who was not bound to her by a religious sanction. During his absence his wife remained as a parlour boarder with the sisters of Mr. Cottle.

He returned to England in May 1796. Publishing news was not encouraging. Joan had caused no sensation in the Row.' Cadell sold only three copies. But in-door life was pleasanter. He took lodgings at Bristol, and busied himself in the preparation of Letters from Spain and Portugal. Time had mellowed down his opinions. The enthusiasm which had, as he expressed it, so lately fevered his whole character, was rapidly subsiding into a calm strength and devotion of intellect. His wishes were bounded by the circle of his friends, and the most magnificent object of his ambition was a little room to arrange his books in,

He had discovered a secret which so many thousands never find, that happiness dwells within doors and not without, like a Vestal watching the fire of the Penates.' He compared his youthfuller passions to an

ungovernable horse. Now he rode Bucephalus with a curb. The rhythmical impulse alone retained its original force and fire. He said that to go on with Madoc was almost necessary to his happiness, and that he had rather leave off eating than poetizing. But he was no longer in a condition to think for himself only. London he knew to be the scene of enterprize. He told Mr. Bedford,— 'I want to be there; I want to feel myself settled.' It was a struggle between the prudential and imaginative feelings. He hated cities of every kind and degree, and preferred a corner of Stonehenge to the sunny side of Park Lane. He never approached London without feeling his heart sink within him; its atmosphere oppressed him, and all its associations were painful. He was, moreover, essentially and unchangeably unsocial. He playfully declared that God never intended that he should make himself agreeable to anybody; and that if a window could have been opened in his breast, he should have immediately put up the shutter. A snail popping into the shell when he was approached, or a hedgehog rolling himself up in his bristles if only looked at, were the emblems by which he chose to indicate his own temperament.

With all these hindrances to London he came, a student of the law. In the beginning of 1797 he paid his fees, and was a member of Gray's Inn. His up-hill path was smoothed by the generosity of his friend Mr. Wynn, who fulfilled an Oxford promise by allowing him an annuity of 1607. His spirits rose. 'Happiness is a flower that will blossom anywhere,' and he expected to be happy even in London.' He gives a glimpse of his doings to his friend the Bristol printer:

To Joseph Cottle.

London, Feb. 1797. My dear Friend,-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. I am happy because I have no wants, and because the independence I labour to obtain, and of attaining which my expectations can hardly be disappointed, will leave me nothing to wish. I am indebted to you, Cottle, for the comforts of my latter time. In my

present situation I feel a pleasure in saying thus much.

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. Should I delay it these images may become fainter, and perhaps age does not improve the poet.

Thank God! Edith comes on Monday next. I say, thank God! for I have never, since my return, been absent from her so long before, and sincerely hope and intend never to be so again. 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. In two years the poem shall be finished, and the many years it must lie by will afford ample time for correction. Mary has been in the Oracle; also some of my sonnets in the Telegraph, with outrageous commendation. I have declined being a member of a Literary Club which meets weekly, and of which I had been elected a member. Surely a man does not do his duty who leaves his wife to evenings of solitude, and I feel duty and happiness to be inseparable. I am happier at home than any other society can possibly make me.

6

God bless you!

Yours sincerely,
ROBERT SOUTHEY.

The literary people whom he met did not impress him with favourable sentiments. The countenance of every lion exhibited some unpleasant trait. He was particularly struck by the 'noble eyes and most abominable nose' of the late Mr. Godwin. The latter feature of that gentleman he never saw without longing to cut it off.' He also met Gilbert Wakefield, with a most critic-like voice, as if he had snarled himself hoarse.' In that respect he must have offered a strange contrast to Godwin, whose speech was delightfully soft and silvery. We remember him, in our youth, at the Monday suppers of John Martin the painter. A noticeable man, truly, with his white hair, broad expanse of forehead, and large solemn grey eyes. The nose was more massive than is usually worn,

but it did not haunt us with any grotesque remembrance. His talkfor we kept to windward of Republicans, rights of women, and suchlike trumpery was exceedingly pleasant, with a seasoning of dry humour and sarcasm, frosty but kindly. The most striking and remarkable portrait we have ever seen from a modern pencil, was a head of Godwin in Pickersgill's studio. It was the old man himself looking through a frame.

Edith by his side, and taking Blackstone and Madoc together, the poet managed to jog on with small discomfort, vamping up an occasional translation for the booksellers, and looking forward to a country trip in the summer and autumn. A bathingplace on the Hampshire coast was his desire. He loved the sea and its scenery; to lie along its sands; to catch its morning, mid-day, and evening appearances for poetry. Perhaps no poet has produced more exquisite marine views; and we doubt if the English 'Parnassus' can excel the description of Ladurlad, in Kehama, advancing into the sea, which opens before his footsteps, and makes a roof of crystal over his head :— With steady tread he held his way

Adown the sloping shore; The dark green waves with emerald hue Imbue the beams of day,

And on the wrinkled sand below, Rolling their mazy net-work to and fro, Light shadows shift and play.

Along the Hampshire coast he had admirable opportunities of studying sea-appearances. The ocean prospect is softened and variegated by the sylvan.

This New Forest (he wrote) is very lively; I should like to have a house in it and dispeople the rest, like William the Conqueror. Of all land objects a forest is the finest. The feelings that fill me when I lie under one tree and contemplate another in all the majesty of years, are neither to be defined nor expressed, and these indefinable and inexpressible feelings are those of the highest delight. They pass over the mind like the clouds of the summer evening-too fine and too fleeting for memory to detain.

He succeeded, after some trouble and walking to and fro, in finding lodgings near Christchurch. His mother came to him from Bath, with his brother Thomas, a midshipman

in the navy, and just then released from a French prison at Brest. The season, the country, and his friends, all helped to endear the holyday. 'The only drawbacks were his detested legal studies, and the idea of returning to London.'

The unequal contest between Poetry and Law was not waged long. Blackstone and Coke, with that Littleton to whom for so many years he has been a sort of rough-rider, retreated before a gathering rank-andfile of literary enterprizes. He abandoned his London residence for a small house at Westbury, a village near Bristol, and spoke of this season as among the happiest of his life. One of the pleasantest walks in England led him to young Humphry Davy, in the bloom of manhood and intellect, who repaid the recitation of passages from Madoc, with the exhibition of some new chemical experiment. He called his house Martin Hall, in honour of the flourishing colonies of that bird which surrounded and built in it. It was old, but affording delicious prospects, with an abundant garden and incomparable currant puddings. And here, in a Kamtschatkan winter, December 14, 1798, enveloped in a great-coat, formidable and hirsute,' in the twentyfifth year of his age, and under a fixed, though not pleasing conviction, that his heart was affected, the first volume ends its story of Robert Southey.

The second volume opens with a picture of the poet in full activity,play plots maturing in his head, but none ripe. They were of all kinds,-classical, European, and domestic. All this time his health was shattered.

I thought (he wrote) I was like a Scotch fir, and could grow anywhere; but I am sadly altered, and my nerves are in a vile state. I am almost ashamed of my own feelings, but they depend not upon volition. These things throw a fog over the prospect of life. *** You know not the alteration I feel. I could once have slept with the Seven Sleepers without a miracle; now the least sound wakes me, and with alarm.

These were painful confessions, but he struggled on to keep his terms at Gray's Inn. A pleasanter episode in his life was the growth of Madoc,

Two

My walk to Ilfracombe led me through Lynmouth, the finest spot, except Cintra and the Arrabida, that I ever saw. rivers join at Lynmouth. You probably know the hill streams of Devonshire,each of these flows down a coombe, rolling down over huge stones like a long waterfall; immediately at their junction they enter the sea, and the rivers and the sea make but one sound of uproar. Of these coombes the one is richly wooded; the other runs between two high, bare, stony hills. From the hill between the two is a prospect most magnificent; on either hand, the coombes and the river before the little village. The beautiful little village, which I am assured by one who is familiar with Switzerland, resem. bles a Swiss village,-this alone would constitute a view beautiful enough to repay the weariness of a long journey; but, to complete it, there is the blue and boundless sea, for the faint and feeble line of the Welsh coast is only to be seen on the right hand if the day be perfectly clear. Ascending from Lynmouth up a road of serpentining perpendicularity you reach a lane, which by a slight descent leads to the Valley of Stones,-a spot which, as one of the greatest wonders, indeed, in the West of England, would attract many visitors if the roads were passable by carriages. Imagine a narrow vale between two ridges of hills somewhat steep the southern hill turfed; the vale which runs from east to west covered with huge stones and fragments of stones among the fern that fills it; the northern ridge completely bare, and excoriated of all turf and all soil, the very bones and skeleton of the earth,rock reclining upon rock, stone piled upon stone, a huge and terrific mass. palace of the Preadamite kings, a city of the Anakim, must have appeared so shapeless, and yet so like the ruins of what had been shaped after the waters of the flood subsided. I ascended with some toil the highest point; two large stones inclining on each other formed a rude portal on the summit. Here I sat down. A little level platform, about two yards long, lay before me, and then

:

A

the eye immediately fell upon the sea, far, very far below. I never felt the sublimity of solitude before.-Vol. ii. p. 22, 3.

But the sweet breezes of Devonshire wafted small vigour to the poet. Soon after his return, a nervous fever laid him on his bed in a state of deplorable weakness. In

search of medical help he again visited Bristol, a city which he afterwards commended, in the Life of Wesley, as one of the most ancient, most beautiful, and most interesting in England. Nor is the surrounding scenery less remarkable, with its elm-shadowed fields, and prospectbounding sea.' In the poetry of Southey and Coleridge we find charming sketches of the walks and landscapes:

The bare bleak mountain speckled thin with sheep;

Grey clouds, that shadowing spot the sunny fields;

And river, now with bushy rocks o'erbrowed,

Now winding bright and full, with naked banks;

And seats and lawns, the Abbey and the wood,

And cots, and hamlets, and faint cityspire;

The Channel there, the islands and white sails,

Dim coasts, and cloud-like hills.

Mr. Bowles traced his earliest associations of poetry with picturesque scenery, to that charming BrockleyCombe, from whence the eye takes in a long reach of the Severn, woods, villages, and the glimmering hilloutline of Wales. A very different person, Robert Hall, was almost

equally enthusiastic. • Were you

ever in Bristol?' he asked Dr. Gregory. There is scenery worth looking upon, and worth thinking of.'

At this time, however, scenery shone very dimly upon Southey. His letters give distressing glimpses of his sufferings. 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.' A change of climate seeming to offer the likeliest remedy, his thoughts reverted to his uncle at Lisbon. That affectionate friend did not fail him. He cordially invited his sick relative to try the southern air, and to come

as quickly as possible. Southey was very willing to obey the summons. His uncle possessed an excellent library, and a pleasant brook ran before his door. Several of the poet's letters from Portugal are printed in this volume, and are very entertaining. One remark upon the national appearance is worthy of Tacitus or Macchiavelli:

I meet the galley-slaves sometimes, and have looked at them with a physiognomic eye to see if they differed from the rest of the people. It appeared to me that they had been found out, the others had not.

Lisbon is chiefly supplied from gardens scattered along the Valley of Chellas,-a delicious spot, with its orange-trees, vine-embowered walks, broad-leafed figs, corn-fields and olives, hedges of rose and woodbine, and all the luscious fruitage of the Hesperides. Cintra was even lovelier. Most readers have long ago wandered among its green and cooling shades, and eaten its delicious grapes, in the narrative of Mr. Beckford. A stranger, softer, dreamier region, never swam into the halfshut eye of Collins or Thomson. It was the very home of Indolence : A listless climate made, where, sooth to say,

No living wight could work, ne cared even for play.

How the hours glided past, in riding donkeys which the rider was too lazy to beat, in picking oranges and figs, in drinking Colares winethe flower of claret and port distilled and interfused-and in a voluptuous siesta of two hours! The days had no cloud, and purple evenings glimmered and fainted into such balmy and visionary moonlight, as Claude might have felt, or Mariana have seen on the old tapestry in the Moated Grange.

But the poet did not yield to Capua. In the enchanted garden of Circe he heard the voice of Minerva. He worked. Thalaba was finished, the Indian story was begun, and Madoc rose in broader outline on the inward eye. A short residence in Wales was required to give the true tone to the Cambrian hero, and the author anxiously contemplated it. He returned to England with improved health. Southern sunshine had done much for him, but the

casting off the burden of Law did more. The ghost of Blackstone was laid, and the poet could look the Epic Muse in the face.

While searching about for a resting-place where he might receive her visits, in the quiet and peace that she loves, he was fortunately directed to that mountain-home, which was to be his abode for the longest period of his life, the birth-place of all his children (save one), and the place of his final rest.' It happened at that period to be occupied by Coleridge, who thus pleasantly describes its character and charms :

Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which is one field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery-garden. Behind the house is an orchard, and a small wood on a steep slope, at the foot of which flows the river Greta, which winds round and catches the evening lights in the front of the house. In front, we have a giant's camp - an encamped army of tent-like mountains"; which, by an inverted arch, gives a view of another vale. On our right, the lovely vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left Derwent water, Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrodale. Behind us the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two chasms and a tent-like ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have not seen in all your wanderings.Vol. ii. p. 147.

Southey did not immediately appreciate the enthusiasm of his friend. He sighed for the Mondego and the Tagus, for the great Mouchique and Cintra. But his studies of the picturesque were suddenly interrupted by the most promising invitation he had hitherto received. His kind protector and associate, Mr. Wynn, had obtained for him the appointment of private secretary to the Irish Chancellor of Exchequer, with a salary of 350l. He accordingly sailed for Dublin, but remained there only a short time, and spent the remainder of the year in London. His official duties were not burdensome; and frequent holydays interspersed pleasant intervals of literary leisure. Meanwhile Thalaba moved slowly, but he introduced the writer to Holland House. In the beginning of the following year he lost his mother, and with her the last friend of his infancy and childhood. If his admirers hoped that he was now on

the road to political distinction, they were to be disappointed. The Chancellor, having nothing for his secretary to do, proposed to him the education of his son, as a sort of employment of spare time. The secretary declined the offer, and lost his salary with his pupil. Southey could not have been ignorant of the value of that pecuniary independence, which he was almost rashly casting away. In one of his letters he speaks of his early struggles, with something of the sadness and reality that lend such power to the Journal of Crabbe:

When Joan of Arc was in the press I had as many legitimate causes for unhappiness as any man need have,—uncertainty for the future and immediate want, in the literal and plain meaning of the word. I often walked the streets at dinner-time for want of a dinner, when I had not eighteen-pence for the ordinary, nor bread and cheese at my lodgings. But do not suppose that I thought of my dinner when I was walking. My head was full of what I was composing: when I lay down at night, I was planning my poem; and when I rose up in the morning, the poem was the first thought to which I was awake. The scanty profits of that poem I was then anticipating in my lodging-house bills for tea, bread, and butter, and those little &c.'s which amount to a formidable sum when a man has no resourses.-P. 208.

To

After relinquishing his secretaryship he took up his abode at Bristol," covered his tables with folios, and laboured for immortality and Longman. Poetry had been almost laid aside; he found that tugging at the historical oar was more likely to bring him into port; and his chief attention was turned to finding beds, chairs, and a table for a house-when he could get one. Not that the Muse was utterly forgotten. assist the destitute relations of Chatterton, he busied himself in preparing an edition of his poems for the press, which appeared at the close of 1802, and yielded more than 300l. to the benevolent design of the editor. He had no intention of settling himself at Bristol. Keswick, with the Ghost of old Skiddaw lowering over it, had many attractions in his eye. But to him a green-house plant, and pining for the sun its cold, rainy climate, was a strong objection. He did not know where to choose. Now he thought of green Richmond, with