My home, for the first two years while I went to Williams’s school, was at my father’s, except that during the holydays I was with Miss Tyler, either when she had lodgings at Bath, or was visiting Miss Palmer there. The first summer holydays I passed with her at Weymouth, whither she was invited to join her friend Mrs. Dolignon.
OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 81 |
This lady, whom I remember with the utmost reverence and affection, was a widow with two children, Louisa, who was three or four years older than me, and John, who was just my age. Her maiden name was Delamare, she and her husband being both of refugee race,—an extraction of which I should be far more proud than if my family name were to be found in the Roll of Battle Abbey. I have heard that Mr. Dolignon, in some delirium, died by his own hand, and this perhaps may have broken her spirits, and given a subdued and somewhat pensive manner to one who was naturally among the gentlest, meekest, kindest of human beings. I shall often have to speak of her in these letters. She had known me at Bath in my earliest childhood; I had the good fortune then to obtain a place in her affections, and that place I retained, even when she thought it necessary to estrange me from her family.
Landor, who paints always with the finest touch of truth, whether he is describing external or internal nature, makes his Charoba disappointed at the first sight of the sea:
“She coldly said, her long-lashed eyes abased, ‘Is this the mighty ocean?—Is this
all?’” |
82 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
The first book which I ever possessed beyond the size of
Mr. Newberry’s gilt regiment,
was given me soon after this visit by Mrs.
Dolignon. It was Hoole’s translation of the Gerusalemme
Liberata. She had heard me speak of it with a delight and
interest above my years. My curiosity to read the poem had been strongly
excited by the stories of Olendo and
Sophronia, and of the Enchanted Forest
as versified by Mrs. Rowe. I read them in
the volume of her Letters,
and despaired at the time of ever reading
OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 83 |
During the years that I resided in Wine Street, I was upon
a short allowance of books. My father read nothing except Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal. A small
glass cupboard over the desk in the back parlour held his wine glasses and all
his library. It consisted of the Spectator, three or four volumes of the Oxford Magazine, one of the Freeholder’s, and one of the Town and Country; these he had
taken in during the Wilkes and Liberty
epidemic. My brother Tom and I spoilt
them by colouring, that is bedaubing, the prints; but I owe to them some
knowledge of the political wit, warfare, and scandal of those days; and from
one of them that excellent poem the Old Batchelor was cut out, which I
reprinted in the Annual Anthology.
The other books were
84 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
The holidays made amends for this penury, and Bull’s
Circulating Library was then to me what the Bodleian would be now. Hoole, in his notes, frequently referred to
the Orlando Furioso. I saw
some volumes thus lettered on Bull’s counter, and my heart leaped for
joy. They proved to be the original; but the shopman, Mr.
Cruett (a most obliging man he was), immediately put the
translation into my hand, and I do not think any accession of fortune could now
give me so much delight as I then derived from that vile version of
Hoole’s. There, in the notes, I first saw the
name of Spenser, and some stanzas of the
Faery Queen.
Accordingly, when I returned the last volume I asked if that work was in the
library. My friend Cruett replied that they had it, but it
was written in old English, and I should not be able to understand it. This did
not appear to me so much a necessary consequence as he supposed, and I
therefore requested he would let me look at it. It was the quarto edition of
’17, in three volumes, with large prints folded in the middle, equally
worthless (like all the prints of that age) in design and execution. There was
nothing in the
OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 85 |
When Miss Tyler had
lived about among her friends as long as it was convenient for them to
entertain her, and longer in lodgings than was convenient for herself, she
began to think of looking out for a house at Bristol; and, owing to some odd
circumstances, I was the means of finding one which precisely suited her.
Mrs. Wraxall, the widow of a lawyer,
had heard, I know not how, that I was a promising boy, very much addicted to
books, and
86 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
It stood in the avenue leading from Maudlin Lane to
Horfield Lane or Road. When the plan of Bristol for Barrett’s wretched history of that city was engraved, the
buildings ended with Maudlin Lane, and all above was fields and gardens. That
plan is
OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 87 |
The house upon which Miss
Tyler now entered was small but cheerful; Sir Nathaniel would perhaps be ashamed to
remember it, but to his father it had evidently been an object of pride and
pleasure. As is usual in suburban gardens, he had made the most of the ground.
Though no wider than the front of the house, there was a walk paved with
lozenge-shaped stones from the gate, and two gravel walks. The side beds were
allotted to currant and gooseberry
88 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
As soon as my aunt was settled here, she sent for her
brother William, who, since his mother’s death, had
been boarded at a substantial shopkeeper’s, in the little village of
Worle, on the Channel, about twenty miles from Bristol. I look back upon his
inoffensive and monotonous course of life with a compassion which I was then
not capable of feeling. For one or two years he walked into the heart of the
city every Wednesday and Saturday to be shaved, and to purchase his tobacco; he
went, also, sometimes to the theatre, which he enjoyed highly. On no other
occasion did he ever leave the house; and, as inaction, aided, no doubt, by the
inordinate use of tobacco, and the quantity of small beer with which he swilled
his inside, brought on a premature old age, even this exercise was left off. As
soon as he rose, and had taken his first pint of beer, which was his only
breakfast, to the summer-house he went, and took his station in the bow-window
as regularly as a sentinel in a watch-box. Here it was his whole and sole
employment to look at the few people who passed, and to watch the neighbours,
with all whose concerns at last he became perfectly intimate, by what he could
thus oversee and overhear. He had a nickname for
OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 89 |
90 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
I often regret that my memory should have retained so few
of the traditional tales and proverbial expressions which I heard from him,
more certainly than from all other persons in the course of my life. Some of
them have been lately recalled to my recollection by Grimm’s Collection. What little his
mind was capable of receiving it had retained tenaciously,
OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 91 |
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