Gents Mag 1850 part 1 p.354
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Gentleman's Magazine 1850 part 1 p.354
exertions could hardly have afforded him a support. With him at this period, The modest wants of every day The toil of every day supplied; and he soon found in the occupations of literature and the pleasures of poetical composition something far more congenial to his mind and more productive of happiness than could have been obtained by the reluctant toils and slow rewards of a more lucrative profession. We now proceed to a very brief recapitulation of the early events of his life, which however would be better received from his own hand. He made his appearance, he tells us, in the world as a red fat child in August 1774. As he grew up he slept half the night with the maid, the other half with his aunt. No wonder that between these females and a warming-pan in addition, he soon lost his plumpness, and became the lean lank figure he ever afterwards continued. His dress was a suit of nankeen trimmed with long green fringe. In this dress he was sent successively to two day-schools, the first kept by a Baptist, the second by a Socinian. This was not a very hopeful start in life for the future laureate. But the girl's schools at the time were still worse. Mrs. Siddons sent her daughter to one of them near Bristol, which was thought the best, where the mistress, when asked after a former pupil, used to say "Her went to school to we." His aunt intended to educate him according to Rousseau's Emilius, but, not being able to understand it, the plan was given up, and so, instead, he read Shakspere, and began with "Titus Andronicus;" then, before he was eight, went through Beaumont and Fletcher, being a little puzzled by the "Knight of the Burning Pestle;" and he saw more plays before he was six years old than he "has ever seen since." Such were his early studies; for his amusement he was required to prick playbills with a pin, so that, when held up to the light, they might look like a fairy illumination in miniature. In his eighth year he wrote a play on the subject of the continence of Scipio; - "Cymbeline" and "The Morning Bride" being his archetypes. In Latin he had reached Justin and Nepos, and the waters of Helicon he first sipped in Hoole's Tasso. Afterwards he read Spenser, and Pope's Homer, and the Lusiad. In Virgil's Eclogues he was long detained because the usher could not construe the Georgics, so that he grew sick of them, and never looked into them afterwards, giving up all acquaintance with Corydon Young Southey had a natural incapacity for that one of the fine arts on which Adam Smith has left us a discourse under the name of "Dancing." The fiddle-stick having no power over his feet was applied to his head; but dancing, like reading, being "a gift of God," was not to be acquired, and, as persons are apt to hate those things they cannot possess, Southey has shewn his rooted dislike of this science by saying that if it were in his power he would hamstring all those gentlemen whose fame and fortune are concentrated in the tendon Achilles, and who, indeed, as Lear says, "make their toe what they should make their heart." Having, now that he had arrived at twelve years of age, got possession of Bysshe's Art of Poetry, he bagan some epic poems, the first called Arcadia, the hero of which was Alphonzo who had caught the Hippogriff; the next was the Trojan Brutus. The Death of Richard the Third was the last. In the intervals of these more solid dishes he introduced some lighter fare in the shape of heroic epistles, translations, satires, Elysian visions, and at last a poem on Cassibelan. It must be confessed that his youthful brain was kept in an unusual state of fermentation; but probably much benefit resulted from this exercise of his juvenile powers in an early acquired facility of invention and execution. When he was fourteen years of age he was placed at Westminster School, of which he has given some graphic recollections. His first appearance in print was in a paper called the Trifler, got up by the Westminster boys in rivalry of the Eton Microcosm; a more ambitious work of the same kind, called "The Flagellant," awoke the wrath of Dr. Vincent, against whom it was directed. The doctor commenced |
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