In a former letter I have mentioned Mrs.
S——, who had been Miss
Tyler’s school-mistress. My aunt kept up an acquaintance
with her as long as she lived, and after her death with her two daughters, who
lived together in a house on Redclift Parade, the pleasantest situation in
Bristol if there had been even a tolerable approach to it. One of these sisters
was unmarried; the other a widow with one son, who was just of my age:
Jem Thomas was his name. Mr.
Lewis, the clergyman under whom I was placed
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Caliban had a sister whom I shall not libel when I call
her Sycorax. A Bristol tradesman, a great
friend of S. T. C.’s, married her
for her money; and the only thing I ever heard of Caliban
in after-life was a story which reached me of her everywhere proclaiming that
her brother was a very superior man to Mr. Coleridge, and
had confuted him one evening seven-and-twenty times in one argument. The word
which Coleridge uses as a listener when he is expected to
throw in something,
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Jem Thomas was a common-place lad, with a fine handsome person, but by no means a good physiognomy, and I cannot remember the time when I was not a physiognomist. He was educated for a surgeon, and ruined by having at his disposal, as soon as he came of age, something between two and three thousand pounds, which his grandmother unwisely left to him at once, instead of leaving it to his mother for her life. This he presently squandered; went out professionally to the East Indies, and died there. So much for my three companions, among whom it was not possible that I could find a friend. There came a fourth, a few weeks only before I withdrew; he was a well-minded boy, and has made a very respectable man. Harris was his name: he married Betsy Petrie, who was one of my fellow-travellers in Portugal.
I profited by this year’s tuition less than I should
have done at a good school. It is not easy to remedy the ill effects of bad
teaching; and the farther the pupil has advanced in it, the greater must be the
difficulty of bringing him into a better way. Lewis, too,
had been accustomed to the mechanical movements of a large school, and was at a
loss how to
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C’est le premier pas qui coute. I was in as great tribulation when I had the first theme to write, as when Williams required me to produce a letter. The text of course had been given me; but how to begin, what to say, or how to say it, I knew not. No one who had witnessed my perplexity upon this occasion would have supposed how much was afterwards to be spun from these poor brains. My aunt, at last in compassion, wrote the theme for me. Lewis questioned me if it was my own, and I told him the truth. He then encouraged me sensibly enough; put me in the way of composing the common-places of which themes are manufactured (indeed he caused me to transcribe some rules for themes, making a regular receipt as for a pudding); and he had no reason afterwards to complain of any want of aptitude in his scholar, for when I had learnt that it was not more difficult to write in prose than in verse, the ink dribbled as daintily from my pen as ever it did from John Bunyan’s. One of these exercises I still remember sufficiently well to know that it was too much like poetry, and that the fault was of a hopeful kind, consisting less in inflated language than in poetical imagery and sentiment. But this was not pointed out as a fault, and luckily I was left to myself; otherwise, like a good horse, I might have been spoilt by being broken in too soon.
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It was still more fortunate that there was none to direct me in my favourite pursuit, certain as it is that any instructor would have interfered with the natural and healthy growth of that poetical spirit which was taking its own course. That spirit was like a plant which required no forcing, nor artificial culture; only air and sunshine, and the rains and the dews of heaven. I do not remember in any part of my life to have been so conscious of intellectual improvement as I was during the year and half before I was placed at Westminster: an improvement derived, not from books or instruction, but from constantly exercising myself in English verse; and from the developement of mind which that exercise produced, I can distinctly trace my progress by help of a list, made thirty years ago, of all my compositions in verse, which were then in existence, or which I had at that time destroyed.
Early as my hopes had been directed toward the drama, they
received a more decided and more fortunate direction from the frequent perusal
of Tasso, Ariosto, and Spenser. I
had read also Mickle’s Lusiad and Pope’s Homer. If you add to these an extensive
acquaintance with the novels of the day, and with the Arabian and mock-Arabian
tales, the whole works of Josephus (taken in
by me with my pocket-money in three-score sixpenny numbers, which I now
possess), such acquaintance with Greek and Roman history as a schoolboy picks
up from his lessons and from Goldsmith’s abridged histories, and such acquaintance
with their fables as may be learnt from Ovid,
from the old Pantheon, and
above all from
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The first of my Epic Dreams was created by Ariosto. I meant to graft a story upon the
Orlando Furioso, not
knowing how often this had been done by Italian and Spanish imitators. Arcadia was to have been the title and the scene;
thither I meant to carry the Moors under Marsillus after their overthrow in France, and there to have
overthrown them again by a hero of my own, named Alphonso, who had caught the Hippogrlff. This must have been
when I was between nine and ten, for some verses of it were written on the
covers of my Phædrus. They were in the
heroic couplet. Among my aunt’s books was the first volume of Bysshe’s Art of Poetry, which, worthless as it is,
taught me at that age the principle upon which blank verse is constructed, and
thereby did me good service at a good time. I soon learnt to prefer that metre,
not because it was easier than rhyme (which was easy enough), but because I
felt in it a greater freedom and range of language, because I was sensible that
in rhyming I sometimes used expressions, for the sake of the rhyme, which were
far-fetched, and certainly would not have occurred without that cause. My
second subject was the Trojan Brutus: the defeat and death
of King Richard and the Union
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In my twelfth and thirteenth year, besides these loftier
attempts, I wrote three heroic epistles in rhyme: the one was from Diomede to Egiale; the second from Octavia to Mark Anthony;
the third from Alexander to his father
Herod, a subject with which Josephus supplied me. I made also some
translations from Ovid, Virgil, and Horace; and composed a satirical description of English
manners, as delivered by Omai, the
Taheitean, to his countrymen on his return. On the thirteenth anniversary of my
birth, supposing (by an error which appeared to be common enough at the
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One of these juvenile efforts was wholly original in its
design. It was an attempt to exhibit the story of the Trojan War in a dramatic
form, laying the scene in Elysium, where the events which had happened on earth
were related by the souls of the respective heroes as they successively
descended. The opening was a dialogue between Laodamia and Protesilaus,
in couplets: the best rhymes which I had yet written. But I did not proceed
far, probably because the design was too difficult, and this would
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I wonder whether Spurzheim could, at that time, have discovered an organ of
constructiveness in my pericranium. The Elysian drama might seem to indicate
that the faculty was there, but not a trace of it was to be found in any of the
heroic poems which I attempted. They were all begun upon a mere general notion
of the subject, without any prearrangement, and very little preconception of
the incidents by which the catastrophe was to be brought about. When I sat down
to write, I had to look as much for the incidents, as for the thoughts and
words in which they were to be clothed. I expected them to occur just as
readily; and so indeed, such as they were, they did. My reading in the old
chivalrous romances has been sufficiently extensive to justify me in asserting
that the greater number of
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There was one point in which these premature attempts
afforded a hopeful omen, and that was in the diligence and industry with which
I endeavoured to acquire all the historical information within my
| OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 123 |
