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If authorship has its hours of disappointment, it has compensating moments of glory and of joy. The Trifler, having lived to the age of ten months, deceased. In 1792 Southey, now a great boy, with Strachey, his sometime “substance,” and his friends Wynn and Bedford, planned a new periodical of ill-omened name, The Flagellant. “I well remember my feelings,” he writes, “when the first number appeared.... It was Bedford’s writing, but that circumstance did not prevent me from feeling that I was that day borne into the world as an author; and if ever my head touched the stars while I walked upon the earth, it was then.... In all London there was not so vain, so happy, so elated a creature as I was that day.” From that starry altitude he soon descended. The subject of an early number of The Flagellant was flogging; the writer was Robert Southey. He was full of Gibbon at the time, and had caught some of Voltaire’s manner of poignant irony. Rather for disport of his wits than in the character of a reformer, the writer of number five undertook to prove from the ancients and the Fathers that flogging was an invention of the devil. During Southey’s life the devil received many insults at his hands; his horns, his hoofs, his teeth, his tail, his moral character, were painfully referred to; and the devil took it, like a sensible fiend, in good part. Not so Dr. Vincent; the preceptorial dignity was impugned by some unmannerly brat; a bulwark of the British Constitution was at stake. Dr. Vincent made haste to prosecute the publisher for libel. Matters having taken unexpectedly so serious a turn, Southey came forward, avowed himself the writer, and, with some sense of shame in yielding to resentment so unwarranted and so dull, he offered his apology. The head-master’s wrath still held on its way, and Southey was privately expelled.