Southey returned to England, and commenced the study of the law, but after a year's drudgery gave it up. His wife joined him in a second visit to Portugal, and on his return he commenced the laborious literary career which he pursued till his death. He enjoyed on the whole a happy married life; took pleasure in his home and his family; loving his children and his wife Edith dearly. This is one of his own pictures:--"Glance into the little room where sits the gray-haired man, 'working hard and getting little--a bare maintenance, and hardly that; writing poems and history for posterity with his whole heart and soul; one daily progressing in learning, not so learned as he is poor, not so poor as proud, not so proud as happy.'" Great men have invited him to London, and he is now answering the invitation. The thought of the journey plagues him. "Oh dear, oh dear!" he writes, "there is such a comfort in one's old coat and old shoes, one's own chair and own fireside, one's own writing-desk and own library--with a little girl climbing up to my neck and saying, 'Don't go to London, papa, you must stay with Edith'--and a little boy whom I have taught to speak the language of cats, dogs, cuckoos, jackasses, &c., before he can articulate a word of his own--there is such a comfort in all these things, that _transportation_ to London seems a heavier punishment than any sins of mine deserve." But a sad calamity fell upon him in his old age. His dear Edith was suddenly bereft of reason. "Forty years," he writes to Grosvenor Bedford from York, "has she been the life of my life--and I have left her this day in a lunatic asylum." In the same letter he expresses the resignation of a Christian and the confident courage of a man. "God, who has visited me with this affliction," he says, "has given me strength to bear it, and will, _I know_, support me to the end, whatever that may be. To-morrow I return to my poor children. I have much to be thankful for under this visitation. For the first time in my life (he was sixty years old) I am so far beforehand with the world that my means are provided for the whole of next year, and that I can meet this expenditure, considerable in itself, without any difficulty."