He goes to London, and is admitted of Gray's Inn, Feb. 7, 1797. A few days afterwards, he writes in a graver mood to his early and staunch friend Joseph Cottle. "I am now entered on a new way of life, which will lead me to independence. You know that I neither lightly undertake any scheme, nor lightly abandon what I have undertaken.... As to my literary pursuits, after some consideration, I have resolved to postpone _every other till I have concluded Madoc_. This must be the greatest of all my works. The structure is complete in my mind; and my mind is likewise stored with appropriate images.... On Tuesday we shall be settled; and on Wednesday my legal studies begin _in the morning_, and I shall begin with _Madoc in the evening_. Of this it is needless to caution you to say nothing, as I must have the character of a lawyer; and though I _can_ and _will_ unite the two pursuits, no one would credit the possibility of the union." What follows shows, nevertheless, the folly of attempting to combine things utterly incongruous, and the mischief that may ensue from the attempt. It was very little that Southey could have studied the law, but the effort to force his attention to one subject, while his mind was really absorbed in another, and the perpetually intruding and distracting thought that he _ought_ to be studying the law, was very nearly ruining his health irretrievably, and converting one of the most buoyant hilarious of men into the confirmed hypochondriac. It was in February he came to London. The spring no sooner appeared than he began to pine for the country; he felt his spirits exhausted; he thought his legal studies could be as well pursued at the sea-side as in the smoke of London; he goes to Burton in Hampshire. There, or elsewhere in the country, he spends the whole summer. In December he returns to London, but "remains there only a very short time." He takes a cottage in the pretty village of Westbury, there to prosecute his legal studies. He stays a twelve-month at Westbury; nor does he again return to London to reside. He had attributed his ill-health to the smoke and confinement of the metropolis, but it is after his escape from London that his health becomes seriously deranged. He had not escaped from his legal studies, or rather from the sense of obligation constantly impending over him to pursue them, and the occasional attempts to compel his attention to the repulsive task.