able. If I interpreted aright the stranger's feelings, he did not read their destinies amiss. Herbert became, with his growing years, a child of more and more hope; but, therefore, the object of more and more fearful solicitude. He read, and read; and he became at last

"A very learned youth "

to borrow a line from his uncle's beautiful poem on the wild boy who fell into a heresy whilst living under the patronage of a Spanish grandee, and finally escaped from a probable martyrdom by sailing up a great American river, wide as any sea, after which he was never heard of again. The learned youth of the river Greta had an earlier and more sorrowful close to his career. Possibly from want of exercise, combined with inordinate exercise of the cerebral organs, a disease gradually developed itself in the heart. It was not a mere disorder in the functions, it was a disease in the structure of the organ, and admitted of no permanent relief, consequently of no final hope. He died 1; and with him died for ever the golden hopes, the radiant felicity, and the internal serenity, of the unhappy father. It was from Southey himself, speaking without external signs of agitation, calmly, dispassionately, almost coldly, but with the coldness of a settled despondency, that I heard, whilst accompanying him through Grasmere on his road homewards. to Keswick from some visit he had been paying to Wordsworth at Rydal Mount, his settled feelings and convictions as connected with that loss. For him, in this world, he said, happiness there could be none; for his tenderest affections, the very deepest by many degrees which he had ever known, were now buried in the grave with his youthful and too brilliant Herbert !

1 On the 17th of April 1816, aged ten years.-M.

SOUTHEY AND THE EDINBURGH ANNUAL

REGISTER

De Quincey's recollection of the Edinburgh Annual Register in connexion with Southey is altogether erroneous. Though there had been a project of some periodical of the kind by the Constable publishing house as early as 1807, the enterprise was not started till 1809, and then not by Constable at all, but actually in opposition to Constable by the new Edinburgh publishing house of John Ballantyne, or rather, one might say, of Scott and Ballantyne, for Scott (secretly Ballantyne's partner already for a long while in his printing business) was Ballantyne's real backer and principal in the whole of this new concern. In a letter of Scott's to his friend Merritt, of date 14th January 1809, after announcing the great fact that a Quarterly Review was forthcoming to counteract the Edinburgh, he adds :--"Then, sir, to turn the flank of Messrs. Constable and Co., and to avenge myself of certain impertinences which, in the vehemence of their Whiggery, they have dared to indulge in towards me, I have prepared to start against them at Whitsunday first the celebrated printer Ballantyne, with a long purse ['the purse was, alas! Scott's own,' Lockhart notes at this point] and a sound political creed, not to mention an alliance offensive and defensive with young John Murray of Fleet Street, the most enlightened and active of the London trade. By this means I hope to counterbalance the predominating influence of Constable and Co., who at present have it in their power and inclination to forward or suppress any book as they approve or dislike its political tendency. Lastly, I have caused the said Ballantyne to venture upon an Edinburgh Annual Register, of which I send you a prospectus. I intend to help him myself as far as time will admit, and hope to procure him many respectable coadjutors." In another letter, written just a fortnight previously, Scott had broached the subject of the new Annual Register to his friend Kirkpatrick Sharpe, intimating that, though Ballantyne would be the managing editor, with himself for the real editor in the background, all the more important contributions would be from selected hands, and that, as the historical department was the most important,a luminous picture of the current events of the world from year to year

being "a task for a man of genius," they proposed to give their "historian" £300 a year,—“no deaf nuts," adds Scott, in comment on the sum. A certain eminent person had already been offered the post, Scott proceeds; but, should "the great man decline, would Kirkpatrick Sharpe himself accept it? The "great man" was Southey; he did accept; and for some years he had the accredited charge of the historical department of the Register. From the first, however, the venture did not pay; and, the loss upon it having gone on for some time at the rate of £1000 a year, Scott,-who had been tending to a reconciliation with Constable on other grounds,-was glad when, in 1813, Constable took a portion of the burden of the concern off his hands. It is possible that this accession of Constable to a share in the management, and some consequent retrenchment of expenses, may have had something to do with Southey's resignation of his connexion with the Register. Not, however, till 1815, if we may trust Lockhart's dating, did that resignation take place,-for, in Lockhart's narrative for the following year, 1816, where he notes that Scott had stepped in for the rescue of the Register by himself undertaking to do its arrears in the historical department, he gives the reasons thus:-" Mr. Southey had, for reasons on which I do not enter, discontinued his services to that work; and it was now doubly neces sary, after trying for one year a less eminent hand, that, if the work were not to be dropped altogether, some strenuous exertion should be made to sustain its character."-From all this it will be seen that De Quincey is wrong in his fancy that the proposal to reduce Southey's salary (from £400 to £300, he says, but was it not £300 from the first?) was a mere device for getting rid of him because he was an Englishman, and because a Scottish "snob" of the Parliament House could be got to do the work at a cheaper rate; or, at all events, that he is wrong in attributing the shabbiness to Constable and the Whigs in Edinburgh. Southey's own fellow-Tory Scott was still supreme in the conduct of the Register, though he might take Constable's advice in all matters of its financial administration; and, if Constable advised, among other things, a reduction of Southey's salary in the historical department, that was but natural in the circumstances, and Scott probably acquiesced.-In fact, by this time the contributorship to the Edinburgh Annual Register, always a drudgery, must have been of less consequence to Southey than it had been. In November 1813 he had been appointed to the office of Poet-Laureate, then vacant by the death of Henry James Pye; and the salary attached to that sinecure, though small, was something. On the 13th of that month Scott, who had declined the office for himself and had strongly recommended Southey, and who was then still virtually Southey's paymaster for his services in the Edinburgh Annual Register, had written his congratulations to Southey, with his regrets that the Laureateship was not better worth his while.D. M.

CHAPTER V

THE LAKE POETS SOUTHEY, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE 1

A CIRCUMSTANCE which, as much as anything, expounded to every eye the characteristic distinctions between Wordsworth and Southey, and would not suffer a stranger to forget it for a moment, was the insignificant place and consideration allowed to the small book-collection of the former, contrasted with the splendid library of the latter. The two or three hundred volumes of Wordsworth occupied a little, homely, painted book-case, fixed into one of two shallow recesses, formed on each side of the fireplace by the projection of the chimney in the little sitting-room up stairs which he had already described as his half kitchen and half parlour. They were ill bound, or not bound at all-in boards, sometimes in tatters; many were imperfect as to the number of volumes, mutilated as to the number of pages; sometimes, where it seemed worth while, the defects being supplied by manuscript; sometimes not: in short, everything showed that the books were for use, and not for show; and their limited amount showed that their possessor must have independent sources of enjoyment to fill up the major part of his time. In reality, when the weather was tolerable, I believe that Wordsworth rarely resorted to his books (unless, perhaps, to some little pocket edition of a poet which accompanied him in his rambles) except in the evenings, or after he had tired himself by walking. On the other hand, Southey's collection

1 From Tait's Magazine for August 1839. See explanation in Preface to this volume.-M.

occupied a separate room, the largest, and every way the most agreeable in the house; and this room was styled, and not ostentatiously (for it really merited that name), the Library. The house itself, Greta Hall, stood upon a little eminence (as I have before mentioned), overhanging the river Greta. There was nothing remarkable in its internal arrangements. In all respects it was a very plain, unadorned family dwelling large enough, by a little contrivance, to accommodate two, or, in some sense, three families, viz. Mr. Southey and his family, Mr. Coleridge and his, together with Mrs. Lovell, who, when her son was with her, might be said to compose a third. Mrs. Coleridge, Mrs. Southey, and Mrs. Lovell were sisters; all having come originally from Bristol ; and, as the different sets of children in this one house had each three several aunts, all the ladies, by turns, assuming that relation twice over, it was one of Southey's many amusing jests, to call the hill on which Greta Hall was placed the ant-hill. Mrs. Lovell was the widow of Mr. Robert Lovell, who had published a volume of poems, in conjunction with Southey, somewhere about the year 1797, under the signatures of Bion and Moschus. This lady, having only one son, did not require any large suite of rooms; and the less so, as her son quitted her at an early age, to pursue a professional education. The house had, therefore, been divided (not by absolute partition into two distinct 1 apartments, but by an amicable distribution of rooms) between the two families of Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey; Mr. Coleridge had a separate study, which was distinguished by nothing except by an organ amongst its furniture, and by a magnificent view from its window (or windows), if that could be considered a distinction in a situation whose local necessities presented you with magnificent objects in whatever direction you might happen to turn your eyes.

In the morning, the two families might live apart; but

1 "Into two distinct apartments" :-The word apartment, meaning, in effect, a compartment of a house, already includes, in its proper sense, a suite of rooms; and it is a mere vulgar error, arising out of the ambitious usage of lodging-house keepers, to talk of one family or an establishment occupying apartments in the plural. The Queen's apartment at St. James's or at Versailles--not the Queen's apartments is the correct expression.