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After the courtship on Sunday afternoons came the wedding, and before long a beautiful boy was born, who died in infancy. On the 12th of August, 1774, Mrs. Southey was again in the pain of childbirth. “Is it a boy?” she asked the nurse. “Ay, a great ugly boy!” With such salutation from his earliest critic the future poet-laureate entered this world. “God forgive me,” his mother exclaimed afterwards, in relating the event, “when I saw what a great red creature it was, covered with rolls of fat, I thought I should never be able to love him.” In due time the red creature proved to be a distinctively human child, whose curly hair and sensitive feelings made him a mother’s darling. He had not yet heard of sentiment or of Rousseau, but he wept at the pathos of romantic literature, at the tragic fate of the “Children sliding on the ice all on a summer’s day,” or the too early death of “Billy Pringle’s pig,” and he would beg the reciters not to proceed. His mother’s household cares multiplied, and Southey, an unbreeched boy of three years, was borne away one morning by his faithful foster-mother Patty to be handed over to the tender mercies of a schoolmistress. Ma’am Powell was old and grim, and with her lashless eyes gorgonized the new pupil; on the seizure of her hand he woke to rebellion, kicking lustily, and crying, “Take me to Pat! I don’t like ye! you’ve got ugly eyes! take me to Pat, I say!” But soft-hearted Pat had gone home, sobbing.