e summer I know not.'

In the end he made Southampton his headquarters and spent several weeks
there, going on short excursions to visit some college acquaintances. In
November he was at Naseby, where his father had a considerable estate,
including the famous battlefield, of which we shall hear more in his
later correspondence. 'This place is solitary enough,' he writes to John
Allen, 'but I am well off in a nice farm-house. I wish you could come
and see the primitive inhabitants, and the fine field of Naseby. There
are grand views on every side: and all is interesting. . . . Do you
know, Allen, that this is a very curious place with odd fossils: and
mixed with bones and bullets of the fight at Naseby; and the identical
spot where King Charles stood to see the battle. . . . I do wish you and
Sansum were here to see the curiosities. Can't you come? I am quite the
King here I promise you. . . . I am going to-day to dine with the
Carpenter, a Mr. Ringrose, and to hear his daughter play on the
pianoforte. Fact.

'My blue surtout daily does wonders. At Church its effect is truly
delightful.'

It was at Naseby, in the spring of the following year (1831), that he
made his earliest attempt in verse, the earliest at any rate which has
yet been discovered. Charles Lamb, writing to Moxon in August, tells
him, 'The Athenaeum has been hoaxed with some exquisite poetry, that was,
two or three months ago, in Hone's Book. . . . The poem I mean is in
Hone's Book as far back as April. I do not know who wrote it; but 'tis a
poem I envy--_that_ and Montgomery's "Last Man": I envy the writers,
because I feel I could have done something like them.' It first appeared
in Hone's Year Book for April 30, 1831, with the title 'The Meadows in
Spring,' and the following letter to the Editor. 'These verses are in
the old style; rather homely in expression; but I honestly profess to
stick more to the simplicity of the old poets than the moderns, and to
love the philosophical good humor of our old writers more than the sickly
melancholy of the Byronian wits. If my verses be not good, they are good
humored, and that is something.' With a few verbal changes they were
sent to the Athenaeum, and appeared in that paper on July 9, 1831,
accompanied by a note of the Editor's, from which it is evident that he
supposed them to have been written by Lamb.

_To the Editor of the Athenaeum_.

SIR,

These verses are something in the old styl