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Southey brought to Westminster an imagination stored with the marvels and the beauty of old romance. He left it skilled in the new sentiment of the time—a sentiment which found in Werther and Eloisa its dialect, high-pitched self-conscious, rhapsodical, and not wholly real. His bias for history was already marked before he entered the school; but his knowledge consisted of a few clusters of historical facts grouped around the subjects of various projected epics, and dotting at wide distances and almost at random the vast expanse of time. Now he made acquaintance with that book which, more than any other, displays the breadth, the variety, and the independence of the visible lives of nations. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall leaves a reader cold who cares only to quicken his own inmost being by contact with what is most precious in man’s spiritual history; one chapter of Augustine’s Confessions, one sentence of the Imitation—each a live coal from off the altar—will be of more worth to such an one than all the mass and laboured majesty of Gibbon. But one who can gaze with a certain impersonal regard on the spectacle of the world will find the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, more than almost any other single book, replenish and dilate the mind. In it Southey viewed for the first time the sweep, the splendour, the coils, the mighty movement, of the stream of human affairs.