The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey
Robert Southey, “Memoir: Mrs. Dolignon,” 19 Janury 1823
January 19th, 1823.
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.
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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?’” |
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and this he designs as characteristic of a “soul discontented
with capacity.” When I went on deck in the Corunna packet the
first morning, and for the first time found myself out of sight of land, the
first feeling was certainly one of disappointment as well as surprise, at
seeing myself in the centre of so small a circle. But the impression which the
sea made ![]()
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upon me when I first saw it at Weymouth was very
different; probably because not having, like Charoba, thought of its immensity, I was at once made sensible
of it. The sea seen from the shore is still to me the most impressive of all
objects, except the starry heavens; and if I could live over any hours of my
boyhood again, it should be those which I then spent upon the beach at
Weymouth. One delightful day we passed at Portland, and another at Abbotsbury,
where one of the few heronries in this kingdom was then existing, and perhaps
still may be. There was another at Penshurst, and I have never seen a third. I
wondered at nothing so much as the Chesil Bank which connects Portland, like
the Firm Island of Amadis, with
the mainland, the shingles whereof it is formed gradually diminishing in size
from one end to the other, till it becomes a sand-bank. The spot which I
recollect with most distinctness is the churchyard of an old church in the
island, which, from its neglected state and its situation near the cliffs,
above all, perhaps, because so many shipwrecked bodies were interred there,
impressed me deeply and durably.
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 ![]()
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more of the poem
till I should be a man, from a whimsical notion that as the subject related to
Jerusalem, the original must be in Hebrew. No one in my father’s house
could set me right upon this point; but going one day with my mother into a
shop, one side of which was fitted up with a circulating library, containing
not more than three or four hundred volumes, almost all novels, I there laid my
hand upon Hoole’s version, a little before my visit
to Weymouth. The copy which Mrs. Dolignon sent me is now
in my sight, upon the shelf, and in excellent preservation considering that
when a school-boy I perused it so often that I had no small portion of it by
heart. Forty years have tarnished the gilding upon its back; but they have not
effaced my remembrance of the joy with which I received it, and the delight
which I found in its repeated perusal.
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 ![]()
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Pomfret’s Poems, The Death of Abel, Aaron Hill’s translation of Merope, with The Jealous Wife, and Edgar and Emmeline, in one
volume; Julius Caesar, the Toy Shop, All for Love, and a Pamphlet upon the Quack
Doctors of George II.’s days, in another; the Vestal Virgins, the Duke of Lerma, and the
Indian Queen, in a
third. To these my mother had added the Guardian, and the happy copy of Mrs.
Rowe’s Letters which introduced me to Torquato
Tasso.
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 ![]()
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language to impede, for the ear set me right
where the uncouth spelling (orthography it cannot be called) might have puzzled
the eye; and the few words which are really obsolete, were sufficiently
explained by the context. No young lady of the present generation falls to a
new novel of Sir Walter Scott’s with
keener relish than I did that morning to the Faery
Queen. If I had then been asked wherefore it gave me so much more
pleasure than ever Ariosto had done, I
could not have answered the question. I now know that it was very much owing to
the magic of its verse; the contrast between the flat couplets of a rhymester
like Hoole, and the fullest and finest of all stanzas
written by one who was perfect master of his art. But this was not all.
Ariosto too often plays with his subject;
Spenser is always in earnest. The delicious landscapes
which he luxuriates in describing, brought everything before my eyes. I could
fancy such scenes as his lakes and forests, gardens and fountains presented;
and I felt, though I did not understand, the truth and purity of his feelings,
and that love of the beautiful and the good which pervades his poetry.
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 ![]()
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she sent to my mother requesting that I might
drink tea with her one evening. The old lady was mad as a March hare after a
religious fashion. Her behaviour to me was very kind; but as soon as tea was
over, she bade me kneel down, and down she knelt herself, and prayed for me by
the hour to my awful astonishment. When this was done she gave me a little book
called Early Piety, and a coarse edition of the Paradise Lost, and said she
was going to leave Bristol. It struck me immediately that the house which she
was about to quit was such a one as my aunt wanted. I said so; and
Mrs. Wraxall immediately answered, “Tell her
that if she likes it, she shall have the remainder of my lease.”
The matter was settled in a few days, for this was an advantageous offer. The
house at that time would have been cheap at 20l. a year,
and there was an unexpired term of five years upon it at only 11l. This old lady was mother to Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who had been bred up,
and perhaps born, in that habitation. The owner was poor John Morgan’s father. Mr.
Wraxall, many years before, had taken it at a low rent upon a
repairing lease, and had expended a great deal of money upon it at a time when
it was rather a rural than a suburban residence. The situation had been greatly
worsened, but it was still in the skirts of the city, and out of reach of its
noise.
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 ![]()
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dated 1780, but must have been drawn at least ten
years earlier, for it marks St. Leonard’s Church, which was pulled down
in the beginning of 1771. The avenue is marked there by the name of Red Coat
Lane; a mere lane it appears, running up between fields, and with a hedge on
each side. It was now, however, known by the name of Terril Street. There were
at the bottom four or five houses on the left hand, built like the commencement
of a street, and these were there when the plan was taken. Where they ended the
steeper ascent began; and some houses followed which, though contiguous, stood
each in its little garden some thirty yards back from the street. There were
five of these, and the situation was such that they must have been in good
estimation before some speculator, instead of building a sixth, erected at
right angles with them a row of five or six inferior dwellings. Above these was
only a steep paved avenue between high walls, inaccessible for horses because
of some flights of steps. The view was to a very large garden opposite, one of
those which supplied the market with fruit and culinary vegetables.
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 ![]()
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bushes; the others were
flower beds, and there were two large apple trees and two smaller ones. In
front of the house the pavement extended, under which was an immense cistern
for rain-water, so large as to be absurd; it actually seemed fitter for a fort
than for a small private family. The kitchen was underground. On one side the
gate was a summer-house with a sort of cellar, and another cistern below it.
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 ![]()
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every one
of them. In the evening, my aunt am generally played at five-card loo with him,
in which he took an intense interest; and if, in the middle of the day, when I
came home to dinner, he could get me to play at marbles in the summer-house, he
was delighted. The points to which he looked on in the week were the two
mornings when Joseph came to shave him; this poor
journeyman barber felt a sort of compassionate regard for him, and he had an
insatiable appetite for such news as the barber could communicate. Thus his
days past in wearisome uniformity. He had no other amusement, unless in
listening to hear a comedy read; he had not, in himself, a single resource for
whiling away the time, not even that which smoking might have afforded him; and
being thus utterly without an object for the present or the future, his
thoughts were perpetually recurring to the past. His affections were strong and
lasting. Indeed, at his mother’s funeral his emotions were such as to
affect all who witnessed them. That grief he felt to the day of his death. I
have also seen tears in his eyes when he spoke of my sisters,
Eliza and Louisa, both having
died just at that age when he had most delight in fondling them, and they were
most willing to be fondled. Whether it might have been possible to have
awakened him to any devotional feelings may be doubted; but he believed and
trusted simply and implicitly, and more, assuredly, would not be required from
one to whom so little had been given. He lived about four years after this
removal. His brother Edward died a year before him, of
pulmonary con-![]()
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sumption. This event affected him deeply. He
attended the funeral, described the condition of the coffins in the family
vault in a manner which I well remember, and said that his turn would be next.
One day, on my return from school at the dinner-hour, going into the
summer-house, I found him sitting in the middle of the room and looking wildly;
he told me he had been very ill, that he had had a seizure in the head, such as
he had never felt before, and that he was certain something very serious ailed
him. I gave the alarm: but it passed over; neither he himself, nor any person
in the house, knew what such a seizure indicated. The next morning he arose as
usual, walked down stairs into the kitchen, and as he was buttoning the knees
of his breeches, exclaimed, “Lord have mercy upon me!” and
fell from the chair. His nose was bleeding when he was taken up. Immediate
assistance was procured, but he was dead before it arrived. The stroke was
mercifully sudden, but it had been preceded by a long and gradual diminution of
vital strength; and I have never known any other case in which, when there were
so few external appearances of disease or decay, the individual was so aware
that his dissolution was approaching.
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, ![]()
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and of these things it had a rich store. Upon his death Miss Tyler became the sole survivor of her
paternal race.
Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533)
Italian poet, author of the epic romance
Orlando Furioso
(1532).
William Barrett (1727 c.-1789)
Bristol surgeon and antiquary who, having been duped by Chatterton's forgeries,
incorporated them into his
History and Antiquities of Bristol
(1789).
Mary Louisa Dauncey [née Dolignon] (d. 1804)
The daughter of John Dolignon (d. 1776); she married the barrister Philip Dauncey (d.
1819) and lived with her aunt Dolignon at Theobalds.
Elizabeth Dolignon [née Delamare] (1745-1802)
The daughter of Isaac Delamere; she married the wine merchant John Dolignon (d. 1776) and
was a friend of Robert Southey's Aunt Tyler; as a widow she lived with her sisters at
Theobalds.
John Dolignon (1774-1856)
The son of John Dolignon (d. 1776); educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was vicar
of Gooderstone, Norfolk (1816-54) and rector of Hilborough, Norfolk (1838-56).
Aaron Hill (1685-1750)
English playwright and man of letters, a sometimes friend of Alexander Pope.
John Hoole (1727-1803)
English translator, playwright, and friend of Dr. Johnson; he published
Jerusalem Delivered (1763), an often-reprinted translation reviled by the
romantics.
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)
English poet and man of letters, author of the epic
Gebir (1798)
and
Imaginary Conversations (1824-29). He resided in Italy from 1815
to 1835.
John James Morgan (d. 1820)
Bristol businessman and classmate of Robert Southey; Coleridge lived with the Morgans in
Hammersmith 1810-16; after losing his fortune late in life Morgan retired to Calne.
Francis Newbery (1743-1818)
The son of John Newbury; educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Trinity College, Oxford,
and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he carried on the family book-selling business, wrote
poems, and pursued music.
John Pomfret (1667-1702)
Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was rector of Maulden and author of a
long-popular poem,
The Choice (1700).
Elizabeth Rowe [née Singer] (1674-1737)
English devotional writer and friend of the Countess of Hertford; author of
Friendship in Death (1728).
Thomas Southey (1777-1838)
The younger brother of Robert Southey; he was a naval captain (1811) and afterwards a
Customs officer. He published
A Chronological History of the West
Indies (1828).
Edmund Spenser (1552 c.-1599)
English poet, author of
The Shepheards Calender (1579) and
The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596).
Torquato Tasso (1554-1595)
Italian poet, author of
Aminta (1573), a pastoral drama, and
Jerusalem Delivered (1580).
Elizabeth Tyler (1739-1821)
Robert Southey's aunt, his mother's elder half-sister, with whom he spent much time as a
child.
John Wilkes (1725-1797)
English political reformer and foe of George III who was twice elected to Parliament
while imprisoned; he was the author of attacks on the Scots and the libertine
Essay on Woman.
Anne Wraxall [née Thornhill] (d. 1800)
The daughter of William Thornhill and wife of Nathaniel Wraxall (1725–1781); she was the
mother of the memoirist Sir Nathaniel Wraxall.
The Annual Anthology. 2 vols (Bristol: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799-1800). A poetical miscellany edited by Robert Southey.
The Guardian. (1713). A daily paper edited by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison with contributions by the
leading writers of the day.
The Spectator. (1711-1714). Essays from the
Spectator, conducted by Addison and Steele, were
collected in five volumes and frequently reprinted.
Amadis of Gaul. (1300 c.). A Spanish or Portuguese romance much imitated in the sixteenth century; Robert Southey
published an English abridgement in 1803.
