32 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
On her return from Lisbon Miss Tyler took a house in Bath, and there my earliest recollections begin, great part of my earliest childhood having been passed there.
The house was in Walcot parish, in which, five and forty
years ago, were the skirts of the city. It stood alone, in a walled garden, and
the entrance was from a lane. The situation was thought a bad one, because of
the approach, and because the nearest houses were of a mean description; in
other respects it was a very desirable residence. The house had been quite in
the country when it was built. One of its fronts looked into the garden, the
other into a lower garden, and over other garden grounds to the river, Bath
Wick Fields (which are now covered with streets), and Claverton Hill, with a
grove of firs along its brow, and a sham castle in the midst of their long dark
line. I have not a stronger desire to see the Pyramids, than I had to visit
that sham castle during the first years of my life. There was a sort of rural
freshness about the place. The dead wall of a dwelling-house (the front of
which was in Walcot Street) formed one side of the garden enclosure, and was
covered with fine fruit trees: the way from the garden door to the house was
between
OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 33 |
My aunt, who had an unlucky taste for such things, fitted
up the house at a much greater expense than she was well able to afford. She
threw two small rooms into one, and thus made a good parlour, and built a
drawing-room over the kitchen. The walls of that drawing-room were covered with
a plain green paper, the floor with a Turkey carpet: there hung her own
portrait by Gainsborough, with a curtain
to preserve the frame from flies and the colours from the sun; and there stood
one of the most beautiful pieces of old furniture I ever saw,—a cabinet
of ivory, ebony, and tortoise-shell, in an ebony frame. It had been left her by
a lady of the Spenser family, and was said to have
belonged to the great Marlborough. I may
mention as part of the parlour furniture a square
34 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
Here my time was chiefly passed from the age of two till
six. I had many indulgences, but more privations, and those of an injurious
kind; want of playmates, want of exercise, never being allowed to do anything
in which by possibility I might dirt myself; late hours in company, that is to
say, late hours for a child, which I reckon among the privations (having always
had the healthiest propensity for going to bed betimes);
OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 35 |
I was inoculated at Bath at two years old, and most
certainly believe that I have a distinct recollection of it as an insulated
fact, and the precise place where it was performed. My mother sometimes fancied
that my constitution received permanent injury from the long preparatory
lowering regimen upon which I was kept. Before that time, she used to say, I
had always been plump and fat, but afterwards became the lean, lank,
greyhound-like creature
36 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
Miss Tyler had a numerous acquaintance,
such as her person and talents (which were of no ordinary kind) were likely to
attract. The circle of her Herefordshire acquaintance, extending as far as the
sphere of the three music meetings in the three
OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 37 |
I can trace with certainty the rise and direction of my poetical pursuits. They grew out of my aunt’s intimacy with Miss ——. Her father had acquired a
* I know not where or when they were first instituted; but they are noticed in an ordinance of Albert and Isabel, in the year 1608, as then existing in the Catholic Netherlands, the magistrates being enjoined to see to their establishment and support in all places where they were not yet set on foot. |
38 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 39 |
Mr. —— must have been about five-and-thirty when I first
remember him, a man of great talents and fine person, with a commanding air and
countenance, kind in his manners and in his nature; yet there was an expression
in his eyes which I felt, before I had ever heard of physiognomy, or could have
understood the meaning of the word. It was a wild unquiet look, a sort of
inward emanating light, as if all was not as it ought to be within. I should
pronounce now that it was the eye of one predisposed to insanity; and this I
believe to have been the fact, though the disease manifested itself not in him,
but in his children. They, indeed, had the double reason to apprehend such an
inheritance, for their mother was plainly crazed with hypochondriacism and
fantasticalness. She was a widow and an actress when he married her, and her
humours soon made any place more agreeable to him than home. The children were
my playmates at those rare times when I had any. The eldest son was taken from
the Charter House, because he was literally almost killed there by the devilish
cruelty of the boys; they used to lay him before the fire till he was scorched,
and shut him in a trunk with sawdust till he had nearly expired with
suffocation. The Charter House at that time was a sort of hell upon earth for
the under boys. He was of weak understanding and feeble frame, very like his
mother in person; he lived, however, to take orders, and I think I have heard
that he died insane, as did one of his sisters, who perfectly resembled him.
Two
40 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
I had not seen him for several years before his death. When
we were boys I admired him for his wit, his hilarity, his open generous temper,
and his countenance, which might better be called radiant than described by any
other epithet: but there was something which precluded all desire of intimacy.
OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 41 |
The next letter will explain in what way my acquaintance with this family was the means of leading
My favoured footsteps to the Muses’ hill,
Whose arduous paths I have not ceased to tread,
From good to better persevering still.
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