that his boy might have his play-time glad and free. The public estimate of Southey’s works as expressed in pounds, shillings, and pence, was lowest where he held that it ought to have been highest. For the _History of Brazil_, a work of stupendous toil, which no one in England could have produced save Southey himself, he had not received, after eight years, as much as for a single article in the _Quarterly Review_. _Madoc_, the pillar, as he supposed, on which his poetical fame was to rest; _Madoc_, which he dismissed with an awed feeling, as if in it he were parting with a great fragment of his life, brought its author, after twelve months’ sales, the sum of 3_l._ 17_s._ 1_d._ On the other hand, for his _Naval Biography_, which interested him less than most of his works, and which was undertaken after hesitation, he was promised five hundred guineas a volume. Notwithstanding his unwearied exertions, his modest scale of expenditure, and his profitable connexion with the _Quarterly Review_—for an important article he would receive 100_l._—he never had a year’s income in advance until that year, late in his life, in which Sir Robert Peel offered him a baronetcy. In 1818, the lucky payment of a bad debt enabled him to buy 300_l._ in the Three-per-cents. “I have 100_l._ already there,” he writes “and shall then be worth 12_l._ per annum.” By 1821 this sum had grown to 625_l._, the gatherings of half a life-time. In that year his friend John May, whose acquaintance he had made in Portugal, and to whose kindness he was a debtor, suffered the loss of his fortune. As soon as Southey had heard the state of affairs, his decision was formed. “By this post,” he tells his friend, “I write to Bedford, desiring that he will transfer to you 625_l._ in the Three-per-cents. I wish it was more, and that I had more at my command in any way. I shall in the spring, if I am paid for the first volume of my History as soon as it is finished. One hundred I should, at all events, have sent you then. It shall be as much more as I receive.” And he goes on in cheery words to invite John May to break away from business and come to Keswick, there to lay in “a pleasant store of recollections which in all moods of mind are wholesome.” One rejoices that Southey, poor of worldly goods, knew the happiness of being so simply and nobly generous.