It is a piece of advice we would give to every man, but especially to the student. Harmonise your labours. If ambition prompt you to mingle two conflicting studies that will not accord, that breed perpetual civil war in the mind, we charge you to fling away ambition. If the higher, and more ambitious, and more beloved study--be it science, or poetry, or philosophy--will not yield, then choose at once for it and poverty, if such must be the alternative. Better anything than a ruined disordered mind; or, if you prefer the expression, than a confirmed cerebral disease. Very pleasant was the life that Southey led at Lisbon and at Cintra, and very agreeable are the letters that he writes to England during this second visit to the Peninsula. "You would be amused," he says in one of them, "could you see Edith and myself on ass-back--I sitting sideways, gloriously lazy, with a boy to beat my Bayardo, as well adapted to me as ever that wild courser was to Rinaldo. In this climate there is no walking, a little exercise heats so immoderately; but their cork woods, or fir woods, and mountain glens, and rock pyramids, and ever-flowing fountains, and lemon-groves ever in flower and in fruit, want only society to become a paradise. Could I but colonise Cintra with half-a-dozen families, I should never wish to leave it. As it is, I am comfortable, my health establishing itself, my spirits everlastingly partaking the sunshine of the climate. Yet I _do_ hunger after the bread-and-butter, and the fireside comforts, and the intellect of England."--(Vol. ii. p. 109.) On his return to England we hear no more of the law, or we hear only that it was entirely abandoned. We find him writing to Bedford (p. 159) about one solitary remaining law-book--"my whole proper stock--whom I design to take up to the top of Mount Etna, for the express purpose of throwing him down straight to the devil." His sojourn in the Continent had led him to think that some foreign consulship would not be unacceptable. No appointment of this kind, however, offered itself. That of private secretary to Mr Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, was proposed to him, and he accepted it. "This had been brought about," says the Editor, "through his friend Mr Rickman, who was at that time secretary to Mr Abbot, and in consequence residing in Dublin--an additional inducement to my father to accept the appointment, as he would have to reside there himself during half the year."