[ [hq] {520}——an ill-looking knave.—[MS. erased.]
[ [555] ["Yesterday, at Holland House, I was introduced to Southey—the best-looking bard I have seen for some time. To have that poet's head and shoulders, I would almost have written his Sapphics. He is certainly a prepossessing person to look on, and a man of talent, and all that, and—there is his eulogy."—Letter to Moore, September 27, 1813, Letters, 1898, ii. 266.
"I have not seen the Liberal," wrote Southey to Wynn, October 26, 1822, "but a Leeds paper has been sent me ... including among its extracts the description and behaviour of a certain 'varlet.' He has not offended me in the way that the pious painter exasperated the Devil" (i.e. by painting him "more ugly than ever:" see Southey's Ballad of the Pious Painter, Works, 1838, vi. 64).]
[ [hr] {521} He therefore was content to cite a few.—[MS. erased.]
[ [556] [Southey's "Battle of Blenheim" was published in the Annual Anthology of 1800, pp. 34-37. It is quoted at length, as a republican and seditious poem, in the Preface to an edition of Wat Tyler, published by W. Hone in 1817; and it is also included in an "Appendix" entitled The Stripling Bard, or the Apostate Laureate, affixed to another edition issued in the same year by John Fairburn. The purport and motif of these excellent rhymes is non-patriotic if not Jacobinical, but, for some reason, the poem has been considered improving for the young, and is included in many "Poetry Books" for schools. The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo was published in 1816, not long before the resuscitation of Wat Tyler.]
[ [557] [Vide ante, [p. 482].]
[ [558] ["He has written Wat Tyler, and taken the office of poet laureate—he has, in the Life of Henry Kirke White (see Byron's note infra), denominated reviewing 'the ungentle craft,' and has become a reviewer—he was one of the projectors of a scheme called 'pantisocracy,' for having all things, including women, in common (query common women?)."—Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood's Magazine (No. xxix., August, 1819), Letters, 1900 [Appendix IX.], iv. 483. The invention or, possibly, disinterment of this calumny was no doubt a counterblast on Byron's part to the supposed charge of a "league of incest" (at Diodati, in 1816), which he maintained had been disseminated by Coleridge on the authority of Southey (vide ante, [p. 475]). It is, perhaps, unnecessary to state that before Pantisocracy was imagined or devised, one of the future pantisocrats, Robert Lovell, was married to Mary Fricker; that Robert Southey was engaged to be married to her sister Edith; and that, as a result of the birth and evolution of the scheme, Coleridge became engaged to be married to a third sister, Sarah, hitherto loverless, in order that "every Jack should have his Jill," and the world begin anew in a second Eden across the seas. All things were to be held in common, in order that each man might hold his wife in particular.]
[ [559] {522} Remains of Henry Kirke White [1808, i. 23]
[ [560] [Southey's Life of Wesley, and Rise and Progress of Methodism, in two volumes octavo, was published in 1820. In a "Memento" written in a blank leaf of the first volume, Coleridge expressed his desire that his copy should be given to Southey as a bequest. "One or other volume," he writes, "was more often in my hands than any other in my ragged book-regiment ... How many an hour of self-oblivion do I owe to this Life of Wesley!"—Third ed. 1846, i. xv.]
[ [561] [In his reply to the Preface to Southey's Vision of Judgement, Byron attacked the Laureate as "this arrogant scribbler of all works.">[