Revolution, and its barbaric excesses, stigmatised as infernal,--who was, moreover a loyal person according to the tradition of his fathers, and a lover of Mr. Pitt--to his horror, the two poets uttered the most disloyal sentiments, denouncing all monarchial forms of government, and proposed to send the royal family to Botany Bay! This proposal, which Southey immediately threw into extempore verse, was so comical, that the whole party laughed outright, and outrageously; they then set off towards Grasmere. De Quincy speaks in the highest terms of Southey, and in the comparison which he institutes between Southey and Wordsworth, the latter certainly sustains loss. I refer the reader to the “Lake Reminiscences” for this, and other most interesting particulars relating to these poets. Still I cannot bid adieu to these “Reminiscences,” without using them once more, as materials for an account of Greta Hall and its occupants. Southey and his family did not occupy the whole of the Hall, but shared it with Coleridge and his family, and with Mrs. Lovell and her son. There was no absolute partition, but an amicable distribution of the rooms. Coleridge had a study to himself, in which was a grand organ, about the only piece of furniture it could boast of. To atone for this, the windows looked out upon a magnificent sweep of country, and objects of sublimity and beauty met the eye wherever it wandered. Southey’s library--already described as the best room of the house--was open to all the ladies alike. The books in it were chiefly English, Spanish, and Portuguese, well selected, being the best cardinal classics of the three literatures; fine copies, and decorated externally with a reasonable elegance, so as to make them in harmony with the other embellishments of the room. This was aided by the horizontal arrangement, upon brackets, of many rare manuscripts, Spanish or Portuguese. The two families always met at dinner, in a common drawing-room. The scenery around Greta Hall was grand beyond all power of description. “The lake of Derwent Water, in one direction, with its lovely islands--a lake about ten miles in circuit, and shaped pretty much like a boy’s kite; the lake of Bassinthwaite in another; the mountains of Newlands, arranging themselves like pavilions; the gorgeous confusion of Borrowdale, just revealing its sublime chaos through the narrow vista of its gorge; whilst the sullen rear, not fully visible on this side of the house, was closed for many a league by the vast and towering masses of Skiddaw and Blencathara--mountains which are rather to be considered as frontier barriers, and chains of hilly ground, cutting the county of Cumberland into great chambers, and different climates, than as insulated eminences; so vast is the area which they occupy; though there are, also, rich, separate, and insulated heights, and nearly amongst the highest in the county.”