ROBERT SOUTHEY was born at Bristol, England, August 11th, 1774. After having been expelled from Westminster School for writing an essay on “Flogging” for the school paper, he was admitted, after considerable difficulty, to Balliol College, Oxford, where he formed associations which were decisive of his future. One of his college friends was Coleridge, with whom he was interested in the famous scheme of “pantisocracy,” through which the young poets hoped to establish the millenium in the United States. This association helped to make Southey one of the Lake School of English poets. After a year of travel, and a brief term in an official position, he took up his residence in 1804 at Greta Hall, near Keswick, where he devoted himself to study with painstaking industry. Few men of his century equaled him in the range and variety of his studies. His “Commonplace Book” is astonishing. It would be hard to find anywhere else so great an amount of curious, entertaining, and generally useless information as he collected in it. He was a man of books rather than of the world, and the distinction shows in all he wrote, both of prose and verse. He became Poet Laureate of England in 1813,—an honor he owed not only to his talent, but to his conversion to “Conservatism” and his complete abandonment of “pantisocracy” and all similar millenial ideals. He died at Greta Hall, March 21st, 1843. Among his best-known prose works are his “History of Brazil,” “Life of Nelson,” and “The Doctor,”—the latter a collection of highly original essays which show him at his best.