The publishing game was new to Henry, and the slings and arrows found an unshielded heart.  When the first copies of his poor little book came home from the printer he was prostrated to find several misprints.  He nearly swooned, but seizing a pen he carefully corrected all the copies.  After writing earnest and very polite letters to all the reviewers he dispatched copies to the leading periodicals, and sat down in the sure hope of rapid fame.  How bitter was his chagrin when the Monthly Review for February, 1804, came out with a rather disparaging comment:  in particular the critic took umbrage at his having put boy to rhyme with sky, and added, referring to Henry’s hopes of a college course, “If Mr. White should be instructed by alma mater, he will, doubtless, produce better sense and better rhymes.”

The review was by no means unjust:  it said what any disinterested opinion must have confirmed, that the youth’s ambitions were excellent, but that neither he, nor indeed any two-footed singer, is likely to be an immortal poet by seventeen.  But Henry’s sensitive soul had been so inflated by the honest pride of his friends that he could only see gross and callous malignity and conspiracy in the criticism.  His theology, his health, his peace of mind, were all overthrown.  As a matter of fact, however (as Southey remarks), it was the very brusqueness of this review that laid the foundation of his reputation.  The circumstance aroused Southey’s interest in the young man’s efforts to raise himself above his level in the world and it was the laureate who after Henry’s death edited his letters and literary remains, and gave him to us as we have him.  Southey tells us that after the young man’s death he and Coleridge looked over his papers with great emotion, and were amazed at the fervour of his industry and ambition.

Alas, we must hurry the narrative, on which one would gladly linger.  The life of this sad and high-minded anchorite has a strong fascination for me.  Melancholy had marked him for her own:  he himself always felt that he had not a long span before him.  Hindered by deafness, threatened with consumption, and a deadlier enemy yet—­epilepsy—­his frail and uneasy spirit had full right to distrust its tenement.  The summer of 1804 he spent partly at Wilford, a little village near Nottingham where he took lodgings.  His employers very kindly gave him a generous holiday to recruit; but his old habits of excessive study seized him again.  He had, for the time, given up hope of being able to attend the university, and accordingly thought it all the more necessary to do well at the law.  Night after night he would read till two or three in the morning, lie down fully dressed on his bed, and rise again to work at five or six.  His mother, who was living with him in his retreat, used to go upstairs to put out his candle and see that he went to bed; but Henry, so docile in other matters, in this was unconquerable.