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:—