a few lines in his handwriting “to fill a vacancy in his collection of autographs, without which his series must remain for ever most incomplete.” The laureate replies: “Inasmuch as you Sam, a descendant of Sim, For collecting handwritings have taken a whim, And to me, Robert Southey, petition have made, In a civil and nicely-penned letter—post-paid— That I to your album so gracious would be As to fill up a page there appointed for me, Five couplets I send you, by aid of the Nine— They will cost you in postage a penny a line: At Keswick, October the sixth, they were done, One thousand eight hundred and twenty and one.” Some of Southey’s distractions were of his own inviting. Soon after his arrival at Keswick, a tiny volume of poems entitled _Clifton Grove_, attracted his attention; its author was an undergraduate of Cambridge. The _Monthly Review_ having made the discovery that it rhymed in one place _boy_ and _sky_, dismissed the book contemptuously. Southey could not bear to think that the hopes of a lad of promise should be blasted, and he wrote to Henry Kirke White, encouraging him, and offering him help towards a future volume. The cruel dulness of the reviewer sat heavily on the poor boy’s spirits, and these unexpected words of cheer came with most grateful effect. It soon appeared, however, that Southey’s services must be slight, for his new acquaintance was taken out of his hands by Mr. Simeon, the nursing-father of Evangelicalism. At no time had Southey any leanings towards the Clapham Sect; and so, while he tried to be of use to Kirke White indirectly, their correspondence ceased. When the lad, in every way lacking pith and substance, and ripening prematurely in a heated atmosphere, drooped and died, Southey was not willing that he should be altogether forgotten; he wrote offering to look over whatever papers there might be, and to give an opinion on them. “Down came a box-full,” he tells Duppa, “the sight of which literally made my heart ache and my eyes overflow, for never did I behold such proofs of human industry. To make short, I took the matter up with interest, collected his letters, and have, at the expense of more time than such a poor fellow as myself can very well afford, done what his family are very grateful for, and what I think the world will thank me for too. Of course I have done it gratuitously.... That I should become, and that voluntarily too, an editor of Methodistical and Calvinistic letters, is a thing which, when I think of, excites the same sort of smile that the thought of my pension does.” A brief statement that his own views on religion differed widely from those of Kirke White sufficed to save Southey’s integrity. The genius of the dead poet he overrated; it was an error which the world has since found time to correct.