Gents Mag 1850 part 1 p.355
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Gentleman's Magazine 1850 part 1 p.355
an action against the publisher, and Southey was dismissed the school. This dismissal shut the doors of Christ Church against him, and he entered at Baliol, where he remained, receiving little instruction from a place whose doctrines he did not approve, and whose discipline he little regarded. To row and swim, he said, was all he learnt at university. We remember the late Bishop of Llandaff, who was his contemporary, telling us that Southey was distinguished for his opposition to all academical authorities; and indeed he says in one of his letters "never shall a child of mine enter a public school or a university." In one of the vacations, when he was just twenty years old, he resumed and completed his Joan of Arc in six weeks. He says, in looking over his poetical portfiolio at this time, "he burnt above 10,000 verses, 10,000 preserved, and about 15,000 are worthless." His religious creed was "Unitarian," to which he soon added Pantisocracy, and Aspheteism, or communion of property in all things, except in a Miss Fricker, the daughter of a gentleman who dealt in sugar-pans, whom he married and made his own; till his aunt at length heard of these projected schemes, and turning him out of doors in a wet night on the 17th of October, 1794, he saw himself without a penny - in Utopia. It may be gathered from this that he had ceased to reside in Oxford, but the exact time when he left is not told us. To support himself, he now gave historical lectures at Bristol, looked forward to settle in Wales "living on brown bread and raspberries," began his poem of Madoc which was to be the pillar of his reputation, paid a visit to Hannah More at the time that Cowslip Green had made it up with Strawberry Hill,* then visited his uncle, Mr. Hill, at Lisbon, where he wrote Thalaba, projected novels, romances, tragedies, and epic poems, of which the list may be found at p.287, determining to begin the study of the law, and settled at Prospect Place, Newington Butts. He says (p.383) he now entered on a new way of life, which would lead him to independence, and that he never either lightly undertakes any scheme of lightly abandons what he has undertaken. But, as Francis Quarles saith, there is little love between the poet and the lawyer's study, and so Southey earned his daily bread in reviews and magazines, as Dr. Johnson and other good men had done before him. He edited the Annual Anthology, went to Lisbon on a second visit, and at length burnt his law books and settled at Greta Hall, near Keswick, where we must for the present leave him, working and fretting, and mending his pens; but feeling that "bread and cheese is the business of the first necessity," and resolving to show how "history should be written, and to exhibit such indefatigable honesty as the world has ever yet seen." We now proceed to give a few illustrations of some of the literary subjects mentioned in the Correspondence, which the editor, presuming on the knowledge of his readers, has passed over in silence; but we think he may have erred in his calculations, and that the race of DODOS is not yet extinct. P.31 "At one of these (watering places) she fell in with Armstrong the physician and poet - a writer deservedly respectable for his poem on Health, and deservedly infamous for another of his productions."This other poem was called "The Economy of Love," which it is said injured him essentially in his practice as a physician, but it was translated into Italian by a churchman of that nation, - "L'Economia d'Amore tradotta dell" Abbate Luigi da Fiesole. 1755." A drawing by B. Rossi was intended to be prefixed to this as a frontispiece, but was left unexecuted on account of the expense. In Campbell's History of Scottish Poetry, 4to. p.222, is some account of Armstrong. He took his "Ramble through France and Italy," which he published in 1771, with the late Mr. Fuseli the painter, who always spoke highly in favour of the great benevolence of his character. Sir Joshua Reynolds and Armstrong were Fuseli's best friends, the latter of whom frequently noticed him in the news- |
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* We mean when Hannah More visited and spoke
well of Horace Walpole, and introduced him to the table of
the Bishop of London. See more of this in Hannah More's life
by Mr. Roberts.
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