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“High-priest of all the Muses’ mysteries,”[2]

was henceforth accepted by Southey as his master.

When Miss Tyler had exhausted her friends’ hospitality, and had grown tired of lodgings, she settled in a pleasant suburban nook at Bristol; but having a standing quarrel with Thomas Southey, her sister’s brother-in-law, she would never set foot in the house in Wine Street, and she tried to estrange her nephew, as far as possible, from his natural home. Her own brother William, a half-witted creature, she brought to live with her. “The Squire,” as he was called, was hardly a responsible being, yet he had a sort of half-saved shrewdness, and a memory stored with old saws, which, says Southey, “would have qualified him, had he been born two centuries earlier, to have worn motley, and figured with a cap and bells and a bauble in some baron’s hall.” A saying of his, “Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost,” was remembered by Southey in after-years; and when it was turned into Greek by Coleridge, to serve as motto to The Curse of Kehama, a mysterious reference was given—Αποφθ. Ανεκ. του Γυλίελ. του Μητ. With much beer-swilling and tobacco-chewing, premature old age came upon him. He would sit for hours by the kitchen fire, or, on warm days, in the summer-house, his eyes intently following the movements of the neighbours. He loved to play at marbles with his nephew, and at loo with Miss Tyler; most of all, he loved to be taken to the theatre. The poor Squire had an affectionate heart; he would fondle children with tenderness, and at his mother’s funeral his grief was overwhelming. A companion of his own age Southey found in Shadrach Weekes, the boy of all work, a brother of Miss Tyler’s maid. Shad and his young master would scour the country in search of violet and cowslip roots, and the bee and fly orchis, until wood and rock by the side of the Avon had grown familiar and had grown dear; and now, instead of solitary pricking of play-bills, Southey set to work, with the help of Shad, to make and fit up such a theatre for puppets as would have been the pride even of Wilhelm Meister.