Then follow some other and more amusing accounts of his schoolfellows, and of their after position and fortunes in the world, and the fragment concludes. It does not even relate the history of his expulsion from Westminster--apparently a very severe punishment for the offence he had committed. The boys had set up a paper called _The Flagellant_. In one of the numbers, which Southey had written, the subject of corporal punishment was handled in a manner which by no means pleased the headmaster; and for this offence he was, as is here expressed, privately expelled. The first appearance in print of our voluminous author was not fortunate. With this event, therefore, Mr Cuthbert Southey commences the slight thread of biography on which these letters are strung. How far this expulsion from Westminster, by exasperating the mind of our young author, tended to foster a certain democratic and rebellious mode of thinking, we have no accurate means of judging; we can only guess that it would have some such tendency. He was now to proceed to Oxford; but the expelled of Westminster was rejected at Christ Church, in which college his uncle had particularly wished him to enter. He found refuge at Balliol, where he was admitted Nov. 3, 1792. We have lost our guide, and the only guide that could have traced for us the course of his reading and the progress of his mind. Southey now somewhat abruptly appears before us as the ardent republican, and something verging on the communist. We left him with Tasso and the _Fairy Queen_, inditing or planning innumerable epics. We find him writing _Wat Tyler_, that poem whose singular history we shall have, by and by, to allude to. From intimations scattered through these letters, we learn that he had dieted rather freely upon Rousseau; that he had "corrected" this diet by a course of Godwin; and that with Godwin he had united Epictetus and Stoic morality. As aunt Tyler had purchased a translation of Rousseau's _Emilie_ in order to educate her pupil, it is probable that he had heard of the philosopher of Geneva at a very early period. Perhaps it was the _Contrat Social_ that first received him when he stepped from poetry to philosophy. At all events, the captivating ideas of perfect liberty and equality, which are there set forth, had taken full possession of his youthful mind.