If authorship has its hours of disappointment, it has compensating moments of glory and of joy. _The Trifler_, having lived to the age of ten months, deceased. In 1792 Southey, now a great boy, with Strachey, his sometime “substance,” and his friends Wynn and Bedford, planned a new periodical of ill-omened name, _The Flagellant_. “I well remember my feelings,” he writes, “when the first number appeared.... It was Bedford’s writing, but that circumstance did not prevent me from feeling that I was that day borne into the world as an author; and if ever my head touched the stars while I walked upon the earth, it was then.... In all London there was not so vain, so happy, so elated a creature as I was that day.” From that starry altitude he soon descended. The subject of an early number of _The Flagellant_ was flogging; the writer was Robert Southey. He was full of Gibbon at the time, and had caught some of Voltaire’s manner of poignant irony. Rather for disport of his wits than in the character of a reformer, the writer of number five undertook to prove from the ancients and the Fathers that flogging was an invention of the devil. During Southey’s life the devil received many insults at his hands; his horns, his hoofs, his teeth, his tail, his moral character, were painfully referred to; and the devil took it, like a sensible fiend, in good part. Not so Dr. Vincent; the preceptorial dignity was impugned by some unmannerly brat; a bulwark of the British Constitution was at stake. Dr. Vincent made haste to prosecute the publisher for libel. Matters having taken unexpectedly so serious a turn, Southey came forward, avowed himself the writer, and, with some sense of shame in yielding to resentment so unwarranted and so dull, he offered his apology. The head-master’s wrath still held on its way, and Southey was privately expelled. All Southey’s truant hours were not passed among folios adorned with strange sculptures. In those days even St. Peter’s College, Westminster, could be no little landlocked bay—silent, secure, and dull. To be in London was to be among the tides and breakers of the world. Every post brought news of some startling or significant event. Now it was that George Washington had been elected first President of the American Republic; now that the States-General were assembled at Versailles; now that Paris, delivered from her nightmare towers of the Bastille, breathed free; now that Brissot was petitioning for dethronement. The main issues of the time were such as to try the spirits. Southey, who was aspiring, hopeful, and courageous, did not hesitate in choosing a side; a new dawn was opening for the world, and should not his heart have its portion in that dawn?