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.