Of the period of Southey's life previous to settling at Keswick, there is little to be said in this work. No good biography of him exists, and the materials for his life are still in the hands of his executors, and not issued in due form to the public. He was born in Bristol, 1774. His father was a linendraper there,--a most extensive wholesale linendraper, says a short memoir of him affixed to a French selection from his poems. This, I suppose, is one of the statements usually made to take off from the lives of men who have risen to eminence, the writers think, something of their vulgar origin. But what care all sensible people what a man's origin was, so that his career was honorable? Who thinks, because Shakspeare was the son of a wool-comber; because Ben Jonson was apprenticed to a mason; because Milton was a schoolmaster; because Sir Walter Scott was the son of an attorney; because Moore was the son of a grocer and spirit dealer, and Chatterton was a charity boy, that they are one whit less the genuine nobles of the land? It is high time that we got rid of this vulgar way of thinking, and regarded all men, all trades, all origins honorable, when there has been no moral obliquity about the persons themselves. Whether Southey's father, then, was "a most extensive linendraper," and could say with John Gilpin, "I am a linendraper bold, As all the world doth know;" there is no doubt that he was a retail as well as wholesale trader. His shop was at the sign of the Golden Key, in Wine-street; and there the shop still remains in the very same trade, and with the golden key hanging in front still, as the sign. In this shop Robert used to serve as a boy. I believe his father was then deceased, and the concern was in the hands of his uncle, who brought him up. However, he was a gay youth, and served only of a fashion. At one time he was measuring off his drapery goods with his yard-wand, at another he was measuring the fields after the hounds, and used to come in amid all the shop customers in his splashed boots and scarlet coat. His uncle did not augur much success in trade from this style of doing business, and destined him for the Church. His friends and associates were chiefly dissenters; but young dissenters, caught early and well drilled, make the stanchest churchmen. He was first educated by a Baptist minister, Mr. Foote, a very able, but very old man. He was then removed to a school at Corston, where he remained about two years, and it was probably at the conclusion of this schooling that it was intended to put him to the drapery business. On the plan of devoting him to the Church opening itself, he would naturally be sent to one of the Church preparatory schools; and accordingly he went to Westminster, in 1787, where, in 1790, he fell under censure, for his concern in the rebellion excited against the master, Dr. Vincent. In 1792, he became a student under Baliol College, Oxford, but Unitarian principles and