"TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD, ESQ.
Kingsdown, Bristol,
Dec. 21, 1799.Grosvenor—I think seriously of going abroad. My complaint—so I am told by the opinion of many medical men—is wholly a diseased sensibility, (mind you, physical sensibility,) disordering the functions, now of the heart, now of the intestines, and gradually debilitating me. Climate is the obvious remedy. In my present state, to attempt to undergo the confinement of legal application were actual suicide. I am anxious to be well, and to attempt the profession: much in it I shall never do: sometimes my principles stand in the way, sometimes the want of readiness, which I felt from the first—a want which I always know in company, and never in solitude and silence. Howbeit I will make the attempt; but mark you, if by stage-writing, or any other writing, I can acquire independence, I will not make the sacrifice of happiness it will inevitably cost me. I love the country, I love study—devotedly I love it; but in legal studies it is only the subtlety of the mind that is exercised.
I am not indolent; I loath indolence; but, indeed, reading law is laborious indolence—it is thrashing straw. I have read, and read, and read; but the devil a bit can I remember. I have given all possible attention, and attempted to command volition. No! The eye read, the lips pronounced, I understood and re-read it; it was very clear; I remembered the page, the sentence—but close the book, and all was gone!
I suffer a good deal from illness, and in a way hardly understandable by those in health. 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. The pain in my side is, I think, lessened, nor do I at all think it is consumption: organic affection it could not have been, else it had been constant; and a heart disease would not have been perceived there. I must go abroad, and recruit under better skies."—(Vol. ii. p. 33.)
He reads and reads, and he comprehends, but he does not remember. It would have been marvellous if he did, reading always with a divided attention. He never could bring all his mind to this task. "I would rather," he says in one place, "write an epic poem than read a brief." And in the most self-congratulatory moment, when he is the most reconciled, or in the least bad humour with the law, he writes thus: "I advance with sufficient rapidity. Blackstone and Madoc! I hope to finish my poem and begin my practice in about two years. I am clearing a farm; I am painting a landscape that shall rival Claude Lorraine!"
Southey had resolved to be poet and lawyer both. If he had really delighted in both studies—as Sir William Jones seems to have done—he might, like Sir William, have attained a certain degree of excellence in both. We have a living example before us of a judge who has written a far more beautiful poem than half-a-dozen Sir Williams could have indited. But with Southey one of these studies was not only indifferent but intolerable, whilst the other was most delectable. Under these circumstances, the attempt to unite them was ruining one of the best constitutions that a student was ever blest with by nature. We have no doubt that, if he had much longer seriously persisted in this attempt, there would have been a general wreck and ruin of mind and body both.
"My health," he says, writing to Mr May, "fluctuates, and the necessity of changing climate is sadly and sufficiently obvious, lest, though my disease should prove of no serious danger, the worst habits of hypochondriasm fasten upon me, and palsy all intellectual power." He took the wisest resolution the circumstances of the case admitted of—he embarked for Lisbon. He threw off entirely—at all events for a season, perhaps, in secret, for ever—the anxious burden of the law. He gave his whole soul to poetry; rode about in the paradise of Cintra, and wrote the concluding books of his Thalaba. So was he rescued from the fate of a nervous hypochondriac patient.
It is a piece of advice we would give to every man, but especially to the student. Harmonise your labours. If ambition prompt you to mingle two conflicting studies that will not accord, that breed perpetual civil war in the mind, we charge you to fling away ambition. If the higher, and more ambitious, and more beloved study—be it science, or poetry, or philosophy—will not yield, then choose at once for it and poverty, if such must be the alternative. Better anything than a ruined disordered mind; or, if you prefer the expression, than a confirmed cerebral disease.
Very pleasant was the life that Southey led at Lisbon and at Cintra, and very agreeable are the letters that he writes to England during this second visit to the Peninsula.
"You would be amused," he says in one of them, "could you see Edith and myself on ass-back—I sitting sideways, gloriously lazy, with a boy to beat my Bayardo, as well adapted to me as ever that wild courser was to Rinaldo. In this climate there is no walking, a little exercise heats so immoderately; but their cork woods, or fir woods, and mountain glens, and rock pyramids, and ever-flowing fountains, and lemon-groves ever in flower and in fruit, want only society to become a paradise. Could I but colonise Cintra with half-a-dozen families, I should never wish to leave it. As it is, I am comfortable, my health establishing itself, my spirits everlastingly partaking the sunshine of the climate. Yet I do hunger after the bread-and-butter, and the fireside comforts, and the intellect of England."—(Vol. ii. p. 109.)
On his return to England we hear no more of the law, or we hear only that it was entirely abandoned. We find him writing to Bedford (p. 159) about one solitary remaining law-book—"my whole proper stock—whom I design to take up to the top of Mount Etna, for the express purpose of throwing him down straight to the devil."
His sojourn in the Continent had led him to think that some foreign consulship would not be unacceptable. No appointment of this kind, however, offered itself. That of private secretary to Mr Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, was proposed to him, and he accepted it. "This had been brought about," says the Editor, "through his friend Mr Rickman, who was at that time secretary to Mr Abbot, and in consequence residing in Dublin—an additional inducement to my father to accept the appointment, as he would have to reside there himself during half the year."
He went to Dublin to take possession of his new office, but soon after returned to London, where the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer was in the habit of residing during the winter portion of the year. Mr Corry is described as a man of mild unassuming manners; and "the Chancellor and his scribe" got on very well together. But the Chancellor discovered that he had nothing to do for his very clever secretary. Having no sufficient official employment, he proposed to him to undertake the tuition of his son. This "was not in the bond," nor at all suited to Southey's habits and inclinations. To use his own words, he therefore resigned "a foolish office, and a good salary."