But fate had already pronounced that Southey was to be poet, and not player. Tasso and Ariosto and Spenser claimed him, or so he dreamed. By this time he had added to his epic cycle Pope’s _Homer_ and Mickle’s _Lusiad_. That prose romance, embroidered with sixteenth-century affectations, but with a true chivalric sentiment at its heart, Sidney’s _Arcadia_, was also known to him. He had read Arabian and mock-Arabian tales; he had spent the pocket-money of many weeks on a Josephus, and he had picked up from Goldsmith something of Greek and Roman history. So breathed upon by poetry, and so furnished with erudition, Southey, at twelve years old, found it the most natural thing in the world to become an epic poet. His removal from the old Welshman’s school having been hastened by that terrible message which Miss Tyler could not forgive, Southey, before proceeding to Westminster, was placed for a year under a clergyman, believed to be competent to carry his pupils beyond Tityrus and Melibœus. But, except some skill in writing English themes, little was gained from this new tutor. The year, however, was not lost. “I do not remember,” Southey writes, “in any part of my life to have been so conscious of intellectual improvement ... an improvement derived not from books or instruction, but from constantly exercising myself in English verse.” “Arcadia” was the title of his first dream-poem; it was to be grafted upon the _Orlando Furioso_, with a new hero, and in a new scene; this dated from his ninth or tenth year, and some verses were actually composed. The epic of the Trojan Brutus and that of King Richard III. were soon laid aside, but several folio sheets of an _Egbert_ came to be written. The boy’s pride and ambition were solitary and shy. One day he found a lady, a visitor of Miss Tyler’s, with the sacred sheets of _Egbert_ in her hand; her compliments on his poem were deeply resented; and he determined henceforth to write his epics in a private cipher. Heroic epistles, translations from Latin poetry, satires, descriptive and moral pieces, a poem in dialogue exhibiting the story of the Trojan war, followed in rapid succession; last, a “Cassibelan,” of which three books were completed. Southey, looking back on these attempts, notices their deficiency in plan, in construction. “It was long before I acquired this power—not fairly, indeed, till I was about five or six and thirty; and it was gained by practice, in the course of which I learnt to perceive wherein I was deficient.”