If Southey had not a companion by his side, the solitude of his ramble was unbroken; he never had the knack of forgathering with chance acquaintance. With intellectual and moral boldness, and with high spirits, he united a constitutional bashfulness and reserve. His retired life, his habits of constant study, and, in later years, his shortness of sight, fell in with this infirmity. He would not patronize his humbler neighbours; he had a kind of imaginative jealousy on behalf of their rights as independent persons; and he could not be sure of straightway discovering, by any genius or instinct of good-fellowship, that common ground whereon strangers are at home with one another. Hence—and Southey himself wished that it had been otherwise—long as he resided at Keswick, there were perhaps not twenty persons of the lower ranks whom he knew by sight. “After slightly returning the salutation of some passer-by,” says his son, “he would again mechanically lift his cap as he heard some well-known name in reply to his inquiries, and look back with regret that the greeting had not been more cordial.” If the ice were fairly broken, he found it natural to be easy and familiar, and by those whom he employed he was regarded with affectionate reverence. Mrs. Wilson—kind and generous creature—remained in Greta Hall tending the children as they grew up, until she died, grieved for by the whole household. Joseph Glover, who created the scarecrow “Statues” for the garden—male and female created he them, as the reader may see them figured toward the close of _The Doctor_—Glover, the artist who set up Edith’s fantastic chimney-piece (“Well, Miss Southey,” cried honest Joseph, “I’ve done my Devils”), was employed by Southey during five-and-twenty years, ever since he was a ’prentice-boy. If any warm-hearted neighbour, known or unknown to him, came forward with a demand on Southey’s sympathies, he was sure to meet a neighbourly response. When the miller, who had never spoken to him before, invited the laureate to rejoice with him over the pig he had killed—the finest ever fattened—and when Southey was led to the place where that which had ceased to be pig and was not yet bacon, was hung up by the hind feet, he filled up the measure of the good man’s joy by hearty appreciation of a porker’s points. But Cumberland enthusiasm seldom flames abroad with so prodigal a blaze as that of the worthy miller’s heart.