other blasphemies borrowed from the German, and too startling even for rationalistic Norwich. Dr. Enfield, from whose _Speaker_ our fathers learnt to recite “My name is Norval,” was no longer living; he had just departed in the odour of dilettantism. But solemn Dr. Alderson was here, and was now engaged in giving away his daughter Amelia to a divorced bridegroom, the painter Opie. Just now Elizabeth Gurney was listening in the Friends’ Meeting-House to that discourse which transformed her from a gay haunter of country ball-rooms to the sister and servant of Newgate prisoners. The Martineaus also were of Norwich, and upon subsequent visits the author of _Thalaba_ and _Kehama_ was scrutinized by the keen eyes of a little girl—not born at the date of his first visit—who smiled somewhat too early and somewhat too maliciously at the airs and affectations of her native town, and whose pleasure in pricking a windbag, literary, political, or religious, was only over-exquisite. But Harriet Martineau, who honoured courage, purity, faithfulness, and strength wherever they were found, reverenced the Tory Churchman, Robert Southey.[6] Soon after his return from Norwich, a small house was taken at Westbury (1797), a village two miles distant from Bristol. During twelve happy months this continued to be Southey’s home. “I never before or since,” he says in one of the prefaces to his collected poems, “produced so much poetry in the same space of time.” William Taylor, by talks about Voss and the German idylls, had set Southey thinking of a series of English Eclogues; Taylor also expressed his wonder that some one of our poets had not undertaken what the French and Germans so long supported—an Almanack of the Muses, or Annual Anthology of minor poems by various writers. The suggestion was well received by Southey, who became editor of such annual volumes for the years 1799 and 1800. At this period were produced many of the ballads and short pieces which are perhaps more generally known than any other of Southey’s writings. He had served his apprenticeship to the craft and mystery of such verse-making in the _Morning Post_, earning thereby a guinea a week, but it was not until _Bishop Bruno_ was written at Westbury that he had the luck to hit off the right tone, as he conceived it, of the modern ballad. The popularity of his _Mary the Maid of the Inn_, which unhappy children got by heart, and which some one even dramatized, was an affliction to its author, for he would rather have been remembered as a ballad writer in connexion with _Rudiger_ and _Lord William_. What he has written in this kind certainly does not move the heart as with a trumpet; it does not bring with it the dim burden of sorrow which is laid upon the spirit by songs like those of Yarrow crooning of “old, unhappy, far-off things.” But to tell a tale of fantasy briefly, clearly, brightly, and at the same time with a certain heightening of imaginative touches, is no common achievement.