Lloyd, afterwards classed with the Lake School, and Cottle, paid him a visit; and here commenced his lasting friendship with Rickman, one of the guests at Lamb's Wednesday evening suppers. He next removed to Bath, and at the end of the year returned to London. He wrote for "The Critical Review," prepared a second edition of "Joan of Arc," and still talked of reading law; but he fancied London disagreed with him, and removed to Bristol. Burnet, the quondam Pantisocratist, had become a Unitarian minister at Norwich. Southey had placed his younger brother Henry with him as a private pupil, and seized the excuse to visit that city, where he became acquainted with the celebrated William Taylor.
On his return, he took a small house at Westbury, near Bristol, and in March, 1799, went up to London to keep his term. The day after his arrival he wrote to his wife, telling her he was already home-sick, and planning how he might soonest do his work and get back. The old book-stalls afforded him his only amusement, and his delight was great on exhuming several scarce and ponderous epics in French and Italian—lured to them, it would seem, by some mysterious sympathy—and the perusal of which was to constitute the ravishing employment of his evenings at home. "I have had self-denial enough," he writes, "(admire me Edith!) to abstain from these books till my return."
It became daily more evident that he was to look to his pen for subsistence, but the prospect to an ordinary mind would have been sufficiently discouraging. With all his prodigious toil, he had made little impression on the public. His rejection of rhyme, and the novel form in which he cast his poems, offended the ear of a generation tuned to a more regular rhythm; while his political views affected their sale, as in those heated times men refused, or were unable, to discriminate the poet from the partizan.
