magazine, the _Flagellant_. He was in fact expelled; but the gravest
consequences of expulsion from a public school of the first rank did not
fall upon him, and he matriculated without objection at Balliol in 1793.
His college, however, which was then distinguished for loose living and
intellectual dulness, was not congenial to him; and developing extreme
opinions in politics and religion, he decided that he could not take
orders, and left without even taking a degree. His disgrace with his own
friends was completed by his engaging in the Pantisocratic scheme, and
by his attachment to Edith Fricker, a penniless girl (though not at all
a "milliner at Bath") whose sisters became Mrs. Coleridge and Mrs.
Lovell. And when the ever-charitable Hill invited him to Portugal he
married Miss Fricker the very day before he started. After a residence
at Lisbon, in which he laid the foundation of his unrivalled
acquaintance with Peninsular history and literature, he returned and
lived with his wife at various places, nominally studying for the law,
which he liked not better but worse than the Church. After divers
vicissitudes, including a fresh visit (this time not as a bachelor) to
Portugal, and an experience of official work as secretary to Corry the
Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, he at last, at the age of thirty,
established himself at Greta Hall, close to Keswick, where Coleridge had
already taken up his abode. This, as well as much else in his career,
was made possible by the rare generosity of his friend of school-days
and all days, Charles Wynn, brother of the then Sir Watkin, and later a
pretty well known politician, who on coming of age gave him an annuity
of L160 a year. This in 1807 he relinquished on receiving a government
pension of practically the same amount. The Laureateship in 1813 brought
him less than another hundred; but many years afterwards Sir Robert
Peel, in 1835, after offering a baronetcy, put his declining years out
of anxiety by conferring a further pension of L300 a year on him. These
declining years were in part unhappy. As early as 1816 his eldest son
Herbert, a boy of great promise, died; the shock was repeated some years
later by the death of his youngest and prettiest daughter Isabel; while
in the same year as that in which his pension was increased his wife
became insane, and died two years later. A second marriage in 1839 to
the poetess Caroline Bowles brought him some comfort; but his own brain