16    THE EARLY LIFE OF ROBERT SOUTHEY


He saw Shakespeare acted before he could read, and he had
been through Beaumont and Fletcher by the time he had
reached the age of eight. His future love of romance was
shown in the fact that his early favorites were As You Like
It and Cymbeline.
When he came to be six years old and tall for his age,
Miss Tyler was compelled to submit to the substitution of
coat, waist-coat, and trousers for the fantastic nankeen tunic
with green fringe in which she had attired him, and he was
sent to Mr. Foot's school, 'the best in Bristol, where he
continued for a year. The boys seem to have been handled
with great severity at this place, and young Robert was
frightened out' of learning the grammar they attempted to
teach him. When the old man who kept the school died,
Southey senior, for some reason unknown but possibly not
unconnected with the fact that Miss Tyler's temper had
finally led her into a feud with the linen-draper's surly
brother Thomas, suddenly assumed direction of his son's
education, and sent him to a school at Corston nine miles
from Bristol. Upon his departure the boy found his
mother weeping in her chamber, and this first sight of grief
impressed him so deeply that it is recorded in his Hymn to
the Penates, written in 1796.
The school at Corston, bad though it was, had a vivid
effect upon Southey's imagination. In 1795, it would seem,
he returned to look over the place again in a romantic fit
of abstraction, and he composed at about the same time at
least two poems inspired by his experiences there. The
Retrospect, which gives its name to the title-page of his first
volume of poems, is a description of his life at Corston, and
the sonnet, To a Brook near the Village of Corston, is a
plaintive reminiscence in the manner of Bowles; both were
probably written at the same time in 1795. He returned
yet again to show the place to 'his son in 1836,1 and de-
1 Life, VI, 311-313.