knew him, and took pleasure in his coming and going. When Herbert died, Southey had to ask a friend to lend him money to tide over the short period of want which followed his weeks of enforced inaction. Happily now, for the first time in his life, his income was beforehand with his expenses. A bequest of some hundreds of pounds had come in; his _Naval Biographies_ were paying him well; and during part of Mrs. Southey’s illness he was earning a respectable sum, intended for his son’s education, by his _Life of Cowper_—a work to which a painful interest was added by the study of mental alienation forced upon him in his own household. So the days passed, not altogether cheerlessly, in work if possible more arduous than ever. “One morning,” writes his son, “shortly after the letters had arrived, he called me into his study. ‘You will be surprised,’ he said, ‘to hear that Sir Robert Peel has recommended me to the King for the distinction of a baronetcy, and will probably feel some disappointment when I tell you that I shall not accept it.’” Accompanying Sir Robert Peel’s official communication came a private letter asking in the kindest manner how he could be of use to Southey. “Will you tell me,” he said, “without reserve, whether the possession of power puts within my reach the means of doing anything which can be serviceable or acceptable to you; and whether you will allow me to find some compensation for the many sacrifices which office imposes upon me, in the opportunity of marking my gratitude, as a public man, for the eminent services you have rendered, not only to literature, but to the higher interests of virtue and religion?” Southey’s answer stated simply what his circumstances were, showing how unbecoming and unwise it would be to accept the proffered honour: it told the friendly statesman of the provision made for his family—no inconsiderable one—in the event of his death; it went on to speak of his recent affliction; how this had sapped his former confidence in himself; how it had made him an old man, and forced upon him the reflection that a sudden stroke might deprive him of those faculties by which his family had hitherto been supported. “I could afford to die, but not to be disabled,” he wrote in his first draft; but fearing that these words would look as if he wanted to trick out pathetically a plain statement, he removed them. Finally, if such an increase of his pension as would relieve him from anxiety on behalf of his family could form part of a plan for the encouragement of literature, it would satisfy all his desires. “Young as I then was,” Cuthbert Southey writes, “I could not, without tears, hear him read with his deep and faltering voice, his wise refusal and touching expression of those feelings and fears he had never before given utterance to, to any of his own family.” Two months later Sir Robert Peel signed a warrant adding 300_l._ annually to Southey’s existing pension. He had resolved to