Almost everybody has encountered these Southeyan verses, and that other, about Mary the “Maid of the Inn,” in some one or other of the many “collections” of drifting poetry. There are very few, too, who have not, some day, read that most engaging little biography of Admiral Nelson, which tells, in most straightforward and simple and natural way, the romantic story of a life full of heroism, and scored with stains. I do not know, but--with most people--a surer and more lasting memory of Southey would be cherished by reason of those unpretending writings already named, and by knowledge of his quiet, orderly, idyllic home-life among the Lakes of Cumberland--tenderly and wisely provident of the mixed household committed to his care--than by the more ambitious things he did, or by the louder life he lived in the controversialism and politics of the day. _His Early Life._ To judge him more nearly we must give a slight trace of his history. Born down in Bristol (in whose neighborhood we found, you will remember, Chatterton, Mistress More, Coleridge, and others)--he was the son of a broken down linen-draper, who could help him little; but a great aunt--a starched woman of the Betsey Trotwood stamp--could and did befriend him, until it came to her knowledge, on a sudden, that he was plotting emigration to the Susquehanna, and plotting marriage with a dowerless girl of Bristol; then she dropped him, and the guardian aunt appears nevermore. An uncle, however, who is a chaplain in the British service, helps him to Oxford--would have had him take orders--in which case we should have had, of a certainty, some day, Bishop Southey; and probably a very good one. But he has some scruples about the Creed, being over-weighted, perhaps, by intercourse with young Coleridge on the side of Unitarianism: “Every atom of grass,” he says, “is worth all the Fathers.”[3] He, however, accompanies the uncle to Portugal; dreams dreams and has poetic visions there in the orange-groves of Cintra; projects, too, a History of Portugal--which project unfortunately never comes to fulfilment. He falls in with the United States Minister, General Humphreys, who brings to his notice Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan,” which Southey is good enough to think “has some merit.”