The poet's marriage had not been a happy one.

He had left his wife, and after some years of a rather reckless existence, she had died, before her time.

This disaster had led to great irregularities of education, and, indeed, Mrs.Hilbery might be said to have escaped education altogether.

But she had been her father's companion at the season when he wrote the finest of his poems.

She had sat on his knee in taverns and other haunts of drunken poets, and it was for her sake, so people said, that he had cured himself of his dissipation, and become the irreproachable literary character that the world knows, whose inspiration had deserted him.