Seven pounds and two pair of breeches are not amiss but pounds take to themselves wings, and fly away: a poet’s wealth is commonly in the _paulo-post-futurum_ tense; it therefore behoved Southey to proceed with his intended study of the law. By Christmas he would receive the first instalment of an annual allowance of 160_l._ promised by his generous friend Wynn upon coming of age; but Southey, who had just written his _Hymn to the Penates_—a poem of grave tenderness and sober beauty—knew that those deities are exact in their demand for the dues of fire and salt, for the firstlings of fruits, and for offerings of fine flour. A hundred and sixty pounds would not appease them. To London, therefore, he must go, and Blackstone must become his counsellor. But never did Sindbad suffer from the tyrannous old man between his shoulders as Robert Southey suffered from Blackstone. London in itself meant deprivation of all that he most cared for; he loved to shape his life in large and simple lines, and London seemed to scribble over his consciousness with distractions and intricacies. “My spirits always sink when I approach it. Green fields are my delight. I am not only better in health, but even in heart, in the country.” Some of his father’s love of rural sights and sounds was in him, though hare-hunting was not an amusement of Southey the younger; he was as little of a sportsman as his friend Sir Thomas More: the only murderous sport, indeed, which Southey ever engaged in was that of pistol-shooting, with sand for ammunition, at the wasps in Bedford’s garden, when he needed a diversion from the wars of Talbot and the “missioned Maid.” Two pleasures of a rare kind London offered—the presence of old friends, and the pursuit of old books upon the stalls. But not even for these best lures proposed by the Demon of the place would Southey renounce “The genial influences And thoughts and feelings to be found where’er We breathe beneath the open sky, and see Earth’s liberal bosom.”