The Bath and Bristol theatres were then, and for
many years afterwards, what in trade language is called one
concern. The performers were stationed half the year in one city, half
in the other. When they played on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at Bristol,
they went to Bath on the Saturday, in two immense coaches, each as big as a
caravan of wild beasts, and returned after the play. When the nights
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Miss Tyler, through her intimacy with Miss ——, had the command of orders for free admission. She was exceedingly fond of theatrical representations, and there was no subject of which I heard so much from my earliest childhood. It even brought upon me once a most severe reprehension for innocently applying to the church a phrase which, I then learnt to my cost, belonged only to the playhouse, and saying one Sunday, on our return from morning service, that it had been a very full house. When I was taken to the theatre for the first time, I can perfectly well remember my surprise at not finding the pit literally a deep hole, into which I had often puzzled myself to think how or why any persons could possibly go. You may judge by this how very young I must have been. I recollect nothing more of the first visit, except that the play was the Fathers, a comedy of Fielding’s, which was acted not more than one season, and the farce was Coxheath Camp. This recollection, however, by the help of that useful book the Biographia Dramatica, fixes the date to 1778, when I was four years old.
A half sheet of reminiscences, written one-and-twenty years
ago at Lisbon, has recalled to my recollection this and a few other
circumstances, which
| OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 43 |
I was introduced to the theatre before it was possible for
me to comprehend the nature of the drama, so as to derive any pleasure from it,
except as a mere show. What was going on upon the stage, as far as I understood
it, appeared real to me; and I have been told that one night, when the Critic was represented,
and I heard that Sir Walter
Raleigh’s head was to be cut off, I hid mine in
Miss Mary Delamere’s lap, and could not be
persuaded to look up, till I was assured the dreaded scene was over. It was not
long before I acquired a keen relish for the stage; but at this time my
greatest pleasure was a walk in the fields; and the pleasure was heightened
beyond measure if we crossed the river in the ferry boat at Walcot, or at the
South Parade; short as the passage was, I have not yet forgotten the delight
which it used to give me. There were three points beyond all others which I was
desirous of reaching, the sham castle on Claverton Hill, a summer-house on
Beechen Cliffs, and the grave of a young man, whom a practised gambler, by name
(I think) Count Rice, had killed in a duel. The two former
objects were
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Miss Tyler, whose ascendency over my
mother was always that of an imperious elder sister, would not suffer me to be
breeched till I was six years old, though I was tall of my age. I had a
fantastic costume of nankeen for highdays and holydays, trimmed with green
fringe; it was called a vest and tunic, or a jam, When
at last I changed my dress, it was for coat, waistcoat, and breeches of
foresters’ green; at that time there was no intermediate form of apparel
in use. I was then sent as a day scholar to a school on the top of St.
Michael’s or Mile Hill, which was
| OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 45 |
* He published some letters to Bishop Hoadley. This I learn from Gregonne’s Sectes Religieuses. |
| 46 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE |
I had not been there more than twelve months when the master died. He was succeeded by John Prior Estlin, a Socinian minister, with whom in after years I was well acquainted, a good scholar, and an excellent man. Had I continued at the school, he would have grounded me well, for he was just the kind of man to have singled me out and taken pleasure in bestowing careful culture where it would not have been lost. Unfortunately, my father (I know not for what reason) thought proper to remove me upon Mr. Foot’s death, and placed me at a school nine miles from Bristol, in a village called Corston, about a mile from the Globe at Newton, a well-known public house on the road between Bath and Bristol. The stage was to drop me at that public house, and my father to accompany it on horseback, and consign me to the master’s care. When the time for our departure drew nigh, I found my mother weeping in her chamber; it was the first time I had ever seen her shed tears. The room (that wherein I was born) with all its furniture, and her position and look at that moment, are as distinct in my memory as if the scene had occurred but yesterday; and I can call to mind with how strong and painful an effort it was that I subdued my own emotions. I allude to this in the Hymn to the Penates, as
The first grief I felt, And the first painful smile that clothed my front With feelings not its own. |
| OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 47 |
Sadly at night I sat me down beside a stranger’s hearth, And when the lingering hour of rest was come, First wet with tears my pillow. |
One of my earliest extant poems (the Retrospect) describes this school, and a visit which I made to it, after it had ceased to be one, in the year 1793. You have it, as it was originally written at that time, in the volume which I published with Robert Lovell, and as corrected for preservation, in the collection of my Minor Poems. The house had been the mansion of some decayed family, whose history I should like to trace if Collinson’s Somersetshire were to fall in my way. There were vestiges of former respectability and comfort about it, which, young as I was, impressed me in the same manner that such things would do now—walled gardens, summer-houses, gate-pillars, surmounted with huge stone balls, a paddock, a large orchard, walnut trees, yards, outhouses upon an opulent scale. I felt how mournful all this was in its fallen state, when the great walled garden was converted into a playground for the boys, the gateways broken, the summer-houses falling to ruin, and grass growing in the interstices of the lozenged pavement of the fore-court. The features within I do not so distinctly remember, not being so well able to understand their symbols of better days; only I recollect a black oaken staircase from the hall, and that the school-room was hung with faded tapestry, behind which we used to have our hoards of crabs.
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Here one year of my life was past with little profit, and with a good deal of suffering. There could not be a worse school in all respects. Thomas Flower, the master, was a remarkable man, worthy of a better station in life, but utterly unfit for that in which he was placed. His whole delight was in mathematics and astronomy, and he had constructed an orrery upon so large a scale that it filled a room. What a misery it must have been for such a man to teach a set of stupid boys, year after year, the rudiments of arithmetic. And a misery he seemed to feel it. When he came into his desk, even there he was thinking of the stars, and looked as if he were out of humour, not from ill-nature, but because his calculations were interrupted. But for the most part he left the school to the care of his son Charley, a person who was always called by that familiar diminutive, and whose consequence you may appreciate accordingly. Writing and arithmetic were all they professed to teach; but twice in the week a Frenchman came from Bristol to instruct in Latin the small number of boys who learnt it, of whom I was one. Duplanier was his name. He returned to France at the commencement of the Revolution, and a report obtained credit at Bristol, and got into the newspapers, that, having resumed his proper name, which for some reason or other he had thought fit to conceal in England, he went into the army, and became no less a personage than General Menou, of Egyptian notoriety. For Duplanier’s sake, who was a very good-natured man, I am glad the story was disproved.
That sort of ornamental penmanship which now I
| OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 49 |
Twice during the twelve months of my stay great interest
was excited throughout the commonwealth by a grand spelling-match, for which
poor Flower deserves some credit, if it
was a device of his own to save himself trouble and amuse the boys. Two of the
biggest boys chose their party, boy by boy alternately till the whole school
was divided between them. They then hunted the dictionary for words unusual
enough in their orthography to puzzle ill-taught lads; and having compared
lists, that the same
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Charley and his father frequently saved themselves some
trouble, by putting me to teach bigger boys than myself. I got on with Latin
here more by assisting others in their lessons than by my own, when the master
came so seldom. This assistance was not voluntary on my part; it was a tax
levied upon me by the law of the strongest, a law which prevails as much in
schools as it did in the cabinets of Louis
XIV. and the emperor Napoleon, and does in that of the United States of America; but
the effect was, that I made as much progress as if my lessons had been daily.
At Mr. Foote’s I read Cordery
| OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 51 |
