JOHN LONG'S CARLTON CLASSICS PRICES:-Decorative Wrapper, 3d. net; THE FIRST TWELVE VOLUMES By LORD BYRON Much Ado About Nothing By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Biographical Introduction ROBERT SOUTHEY was the eldest surviving son of a Bristol linen-draper, and was born at Bedminster on the 12th of August 1774. His father's business affairs being embarrassed, the boy was adopted by his mother's older and wealthy half-sister, Miss Elizabeth Tyler, a woman of ideas and strong character. Miss Tyler sent him successively to three private schools, and herself superintended his education out of school hours. Shakespeare was in his hands as soon as he could read, and he went through Beaumont and Fletcher before he was eight years old. His aunt used frequently to take him to the play : “Superior as I thought actors to all other men,” he says, “it was not long before I perceived that authors were a still higher class." It was the discovery of Spenser's world of faerie that aroused his literary ambitions, and before he was twelve he had composed epics on Brutus and Egbert and Cassivelaunus. At the age of fourteen Southey was sent to Westminster School, where he remained four years. He appeared in print, for the first time, in The Flagellant, a school magazine, writing a denunciation of the 5 159951 |