were assembled in the hall to hear the master read a sermon, or a portion of Stackhouse’s _History of the Bible_. “Here,” writes Southey, “I sat at the end of a long form, in sight but not within feeling of the fire, my feet cold, my eyelids heavy as lead, and yet not daring to close them—kept awake by fear alone, in total inaction, and under the operation of a lecture more soporific than the strongest sleeping dose.” While the boys’ souls were thus provided for, there was a certain negligence in matters unspiritual; an alarm got abroad that infection was among them. This hastened the downfall of the school. One night disputing was heard between Charley and his father; in the morning poor Flower was not to be seen, and Charley appeared with a black eye. So came to an end the year at Corston. Southey, aged eight, was brought home, and underwent “a three days’ purgatory in brimstone.”[1] What Southey had gained of book-lore by his two years’ schooling was as little as could be; but he was already a lover of literature after a fashion of his own. A friend of Miss Tyler had presented him, as soon as he could read, with a series of Newbery’s sixpenny books for children—_Goody Twoshoes_, _Giles Gingerbread_, and the rest—delectable histories, resplendent in Dutch-gilt paper. The true masters of his imagination, however, were the players and playwrights who provided amusement for the pleasure-loving people of Bath. Miss Tyler was acquainted with Colman, and Sheridan, and Cumberland, and Holcroft; her talk was of actors and authors, and her nephew soon perceived that, honoured as were both classes, the authors were awarded the higher place. His first dreams of literary fame, accordingly, were connected with the drama. “‘It is the easiest thing in the world to write a play,’ said I to Miss Palmer (a friend of Aunt Tyler’s), as we were in a carriage on Redcliffe Hill one day, returning from Bristol to Bedminster. ‘Is it, my dear?’ was her reply. ‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘for you know you have only to think what you would say if you were in the place of the characters, and to make them say it.’” With such a canon of dramatic authorship Southey began a play on the continence of Scipio, and actually completed an act and a half. Shakespeare he read and read again; Beaumont and Fletcher he had gone through before he was eight years old. Were they not great theatrical names, Miss Tyler reasoned, and therefore improving writers for her nephew? and Southey had read them unharmed. When he visited his aunt from Corston, she was a guest with Miss Palmer at Bath; a covered passage led to the playhouse, and every evening the delighted child, seated between the two lady-patronesses of the stage, saw the pageantry and heard the poetry. A little later he persuaded a schoolfellow to write a tragedy; Ballard liked the suggestion, but could not invent a plot. Southey gave him a story; Ballard approved, but found a difficulty in devising names for the _dramatis personæ_.