It is curious to notice that, although writing heroic couplets on the covers of his Phœdrus, 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 Cœur 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.