William Gilbert (1763–1824): Poet and astrologer. Born in Antigua, son of Nathaniel Gilbert, speaker of the Antiguan House of Assembly. In 1788 he came to England to work as a lawyer, but suffered a mental collapse and was placed in an asylum run by Richard Henderson (1736/7–1792) at Hanham near Bristol. (In an earlier career as a schoolmaster, Henderson had numbered Joseph Cottle among his pupils.) Gilbert was released after a year and went to London, where he worked as an astrologer and maker of magic talismans. In 1795 he went to Bristol, where he became friends with Southey and Coleridge. In 1796 he published The Hurricane: a Theosophical and Western Eclogue. Gilbert left Bristol in 1798, hoping to promote his idea for a new trading entrepot in West Africa. His friends feared he would attempt to travel there and Southey made enquiries after Gilbert in Liverpool, to no effect. It seems that Gilbert moved to the United States relatively early after leaving Bristol and lived there for the rest of his life, dying in Augusta, Georgia. Southey, however, believed Gilbert to be long-dead when he described Gilbert’s ‘madness’ in The Life of Wesley; and the Rise and Progress of Methodism (1820), a reference that produced considerable public indignation from Gilbert.