but this the state of his religious opinions forbade. A doctor's career was equally impossible, owing to his repugnance to anatomical demonstration. Meanwhile, in June 1794, Allen, an undergraduate of University College, brought a friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge [q. v.], who was on a visit, to Southey's rooms at Balliol. Coleridge soon converted Southey to unitarianism and pantisocracy. Southey himself has described Coleridge's influence upon him in an interesting letter to James Montgomery [q. v.] The friends a month later met at Bristol, and, with another associate, Robert Lovell, framed their scheme for an ideal life on the banks of the Susquehanna. Soon after his first meeting with Coleridge, Southey had engaged himself to Edith Fricker, one of six daughters of the widow of Stephen Fricker, an unsuccessful manufacturer of sugar-pans at Westbury. Southey's friend Lovell quickly married another daughter, Mary, and Coleridge now engaged himself to a third daughter, Sara. Southey convinced his mother of the feasibility of both emigration and matrimony, but dared not open his lips to his aunt. In August 1794 Southey and Coleridge met Thomas Poole [q. v.] at Nether Stowey. Poole immediately recognised the great intellectual superiority of Coleridge, while adding that Southey had much information. The violence of the opinions of both, especially Southey's, was much commented upon, but neither can have said that he would rather have heard of his own father's death than of Robespierre's, for neither had a father living. In October Miss Tyler became aware of her nephew's projects, and he was forthwith ejected from her house, which he never entered again. The Bristol bookseller, Joseph Cottle [q. v.], came to the rescue. ‘It can rarely happen,’ says Southey, ‘that a young author should meet with a publisher as inexperienced and ardent as himself,’ but Cottle gave Southey 50l. for ‘Joan of Arc,’ which had already been offered for subscription with indifferent success. Southey conscientiously rewrote his epic, which was further enriched by the lines by Coleridge which were afterwards published separately as ‘The Destiny of Nations.’ ‘Joan of Arc’ eventually appeared in quarto at Bristol in 1796. Southey also printed much occasional verse, and joined Coleridge and Lovell in composing a tragedy on the fall of Robespierre, and a translation of ‘Poems by Bion and Moschus’ (Bristol, 1794 and 1795, 8vo). ‘Wat Tyler,’ a drama full of republican sentiment, had been written in 1794, but remained unknown until the publication of a surreptitious edition in 1817 (cf. Notes and Queries, 9th ser. i. 323). Late in 1795 Southey's uncle, the Rev. Herbert Hill, invited him to visit Lisbon. Southey consented, but before his departure quietly united himself at St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, to Edith Fricker on 14 Nov. 1795. She remained with her sisters, and continued to bear her maiden name. In the previous October Cottle and Southey had compelled Coleridge to fulfil his engagement to Sara Fricker, an action which laudable as it was in point of principle, entailed great suffering upon all the parties concerned, and not least upon Southey himself. On the eve of Southey's own marriage and departure for Lisbon Coleridge fulminated a portentous rebuke for his renunciation of pantisocracy, which temporarily interrupted and permanently chilled their friendship. There was much real congeniality between the two men, but Southey was intolerant of most men's faults, and of Coleridge's characteristic faults beyond others.
Southey's visit to the Peninsula was the germ of much of his subsequent literary activity, but had few immediate results. One of these, however, was his pleasant ‘Letters written during a short Residence in Spain and Portugal’ (Bristol, 1797, 8vo; 3rd edit. London, 1808). At the same time he began his epic of ‘Madoc.’ A gradual change in his political and religious opinions dated from his return to England early in 1797. It was mainly due to a sense of two special obligations now laid upon him—one to his wife, the other to his friend and former schoolfellow, Charles Watkyn Williams Wynn [q. v.] The latter, out of gratitude for the benefit he had derived from Southey's example and admonition at Oxford, imitated the behaviour of the Wedgwoods to Coleridge, and of Raisley Calvert to Wordsworth, by settling an annuity of 160l. upon him. Southey heroically determined to study law. Repairing to London, he entered himself at Gray's Inn on 7 Feb. 1797, but found that, for him, such a study was but ‘laborious indolence.’ Relinquishing it, he published in 1797 his miscellaneous ‘Minor Poems’ (Bristol, 2 vols., 12mo), completed ‘Madoc,’ and planned ‘Thalaba,’ which was not only a poem of unusual length, but a daring experiment in stanzas of free unrhymed verse. The idea he had taken from a German scholar, Frank Sayers [q. v.], of Norwich, with whom and William Taylor he studied German in 1798. In June 1798 he settled at Westbury, but after little more than a year, with a view to greater seclusion, migrated to Burton in Hampshire. At this time he composed many of his ballads and his ‘English Eclogues,’ besides meditating a ‘History of Portugal,’ editing the ‘Annual Anthology,’ and pre-
