As the years went on Southey received other honors besides the Laureateship.  He was offered a baronetcy which he refused.  He wall “ell-ell-deed” by Oxford, as he quaintly puts it in his letters to his children.  And when he tells them about it he says, “Little girls, you know it might be proper for me now to wear a large wig, and to be called Doctor Southey and to become very severe, and leave off being a comical papa . . . .  However, I shall not come home in my wig, neither shall I wear my robes at home.”

It is sad to think that this kindly heard had to bear the buffetings of ill fortune.  Two of his dearly loved children died, then he was parted from his wife by worse than death, for she became insane and remained so until she died.  Eight years later Robert Southey was laid beside her in the churchyard under the shadow of Skiddaw.  “I hope his life will not be forgotten,” says Macaulay, “for it is sublime in its simplicity, its energy, its honour, its affection. . . .  His letter are worth piles of epics, and are sure to last among us, as long as kind hearts like to sympathise with goodness and purity and love and upright life.”

BOOKS TO READ

Southey:  Poems, chosen by E. Dowden.  Life of Nelson (Everyman’s
Library). 
Coleridge:  Lyrical Poems, Chosen by A. T. Quiller-Couch.

YEAR 10

Chapter LXXVII SCOTT—­THE AWAKENING OF ROMANCE

THE 15th of August 1771 was a lucky day for all the boys and girls and grown-up people too of the English-speaking race, for on that day Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh.  Literature had already begun to shake off its fetters of art.  Romance had begun to stir in her long sleep, for six years before sturdy baby Walter was born, Bishop Percy had published a book called Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.  In this book he had gathered together many old ballads and songs, such as those of Robin Hood and Patrick Spens.  They had almost been forgotten, and yet they are poems which stir the heart with their plaintive notes, telling as they do—­

    “Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
    And battles long ago;
    Or is it some more humble lay,
    Familiar matter of to-day? 
    Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
    That has been, and may be again!"*

    Wordsworth.

Bishop Percy, like a knight of old, laid his lance in rest and tilted against the prickly briar hedge that had grown up around the Sleeping Beauty, Romance.  But he could not win through and wake the princess.  And although Burns and Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, all knowing it or not, fought on his side, it was left for another knight to break through the hedge and make us free of the Enchanted Land.  And that knight’s name was Walter—­ Sir Walter, too—­for, like a true knight, he won his title in the service of his lady.