Next year, while “Joan of Arc” was still in the press, Southey was, with a view to his welfare, urged and persuaded to accompany his uncle, Mr. Hill, to Lisbon, where that gentleman was chaplain to the factory. Consequently, when the epic poem appeared, its author had left the country; but not until he had contracted a matrimonial alliance, under circumstances so romantic as to put to shame the inventive faculty of novelists, and furnish another instance of truth being often stranger than fiction. His reverend friend and patron was under the impression that a change of scene and society would effectually dissipate and banish all fine visions of love, emigration, and social perfection on the banks of a North American river: but Southey clung to the object of his affection with poetic indiscretion and disinterestedness, and took a very conclusive precaution that the first part of this anticipation should be falsified. On the eve of departure for the continental excursion, he took the bold and irretrievable course of privately leading the adored Edith to the altar, where he received her hand as his bride, and united their earthly fortunes forever. It is stated that they parted immediately after their marriage, at the portico of the church; and the bridegroom set off on his travels. Doubtless, in subsequent years he had no cause to repent of having thus baffled the well-meant designs of his relative, anxious as the latter unquestionably was to promote his interests; and many, as well as Southey, who have, after a similar fashion, defied the fears of the wise, and rushed desperately on matrimony, have found in the duties which attend it, the best incitements to exertion, and the elements of honorable success in life. Yet early marriages in circumstances like his are extremely unsafe to stand upon; and Southey’s kinsman was quite justified in telling him to beware. In the year 1796 Southey joyfully returned to England where his poem had in his absence been published; and he began to form the notes he had made while abroad into “Letters from Spain and Portugal.” He found it necessary to accept the fulfillment of an old promise of pecuniary assistance from a very intimate college friend; and then he proceeded to London, with the grand intention of studying and accomplishing himself in the laws of the realm. He was duly entered as a student at Gray’s Inn, and made an attempt to combine legal studies with poetical prepossessions; but this, as might have been expected, proved quite futile. Law and poetry――the perusal of Blackstone and the writing of “Madoc”――were not very harmonious conjunctions, as he soon discovered, to the neglect of the former.