Southey was born in Bristol, at No. 9 Wine street, now the sign of the Golden Key. His father, a draper, carried on his business under the sign of a hare: although all his life a shopkeeper, he had been brought up in the country, and was passionately fond of country sports. He related of his first experience of city life in London that, happening to look out at the shop-door just as a porter was passing with a hare in his hands, it brought the country so vividly before him that he burst into tears, and the impression was so lasting that years after, when opening a shop in Bristol, he took the hare for a sign, having it painted on a pane in the window on each side of the door and printed on the shop-bills. Of Robert Southey's recollections of Bristol there is his own very charming account in the first volume of his _Life_ by his son. We return to Pope's letter to Mrs. Martha Blount for his description of Clifton: "Passing still along by the river, you come to a rocky way on one side, overlooking green hills on the other: on that rocky way rise several white houses, and over them red rocks; and as you go farther more rocks above rocks, mixed with green bushes, and of different colored stone. This, at a mile's end, terminates in the house of the Hot Well, whereabouts lie several pretty lodging-houses, open to the river with walks of trees. When you have seen the hills seem to shut upon you and to stop any farther way, you go into the house, and looking out at the back door, a vast rock of an hundred feet high, of red, white, green, blue and yellowish marbles, all blotched and variegated, strikes you quite in the face; and, turning on the left, there opens the river at a vast depth below, winding in and out, and accompanied on both sides with a continued range of rocks up to the clouds, of an hundred colors, one behind another, and so to the end of the prospect, quite to the sea. But the sea nor the Severn you do not see: the rocks and river fill the eye, and terminate the view much like the broken scenes behind one another in a play-house.