118    THE EARLY LIFE OF ROBERT SOUTHEY
fortune of a grand-uncle upon his father's side who had
married an heiress of the Cannon family. This couple's son
had left an obscure will entailing upon the Southey line a
certain estate, to which the young poet expected eventually
to succeed, but Lord Somerville, the incumbent at this
time, so managed that his distant cousin ultimately fell heir
to nothing but a chancery suit. It was the reversion to
this inheritance which Southey now tried to sell. The effort
was vain, and he attempted, instead, through Wynn and
Bedford, to obtain some official position at London. In
this he promptly desisted when reminded that his well-
known political principles would not commend him to the
favor of government; "My opinions are very well known.
I would have them so; Nature never meant me for a nega-
tive character; I can neither be good nor bad, happy nor
miserable, by halves. You know me to be neither captious
nor quarrelsome, yet I doubt whether the quiet harmless
situation I hoped for were proper for me: it certainly, by
imposing a prudential silence, would have sullied my in-
tegrity." (June 25, 1794.) Authorship was the one sure
possibility, but even for this some independent provision
was needed. The natural accompaniment of such a situa-
tion for a lad of nineteen was, of course, ill humor with the
world, and he railed at not having been trained up to be a
carpenter instead of being devoted to pursuits useless and
unimportant. "Every day do I repine at the education
that taught me to handle a lexicon instead of a hammer,
and destined me for one of the drones of society." Suiting
practice to theory, Southey one night spent three hours
with Shad, his aunt's servant, "cleaving an immense wedge
of old oaken timber without axe, hatchet, or wedges; the
chopper was one instrument, one piece of wood wedged
another, and a third made the hammer. Shad liked it as
well as myself, so we finished the job and fatigued our-
selves." (Dec. 22, 1793). Nineteen years he has lived and