And see the wretched labourer, worn with toil,
Divide his scanty morsel with his infants;
I sicken, and, indignant at the sight,
Blush for the patience of humanity.”
Nor had Southey the consolation of public sympathy, which indeed is seldom shown to such political apostates.
Henceforward Southey cast off his revolutionary opinions, and all his future writings were marked by an intolerant attachment to church and state, and servile adulation of the Royal Family. He soon reaped the reward of his apostacy, he was appointed secretary to Mr. Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, with a salary of £350 a year, and very light duties. In 1807, the government conferred a pension of £200 a year upon him, and in 1813, on the death of Henry James Pye, he was appointed Poet Laureate. In this capacity he did not compose the usual Birthday odes, and New Year’s Day odes, as had been done by his predecessors, but he produced various courtly poems on certain important events. These appeared at irregular intervals, and there are only three which need be specially alluded to, namely, Carmina Aulica, written in 1814, on the arrival of the allied sovereigns in England; Carmen Triumphale for the commencement of the year 1814; and Carmen Nuptiale, the Lay of the Laureate on the marriage of the Princess Charlotte. But last, and worst of all, was The Vision of Judgment, written on the death of George III, in 1820. These poems were all deeply tinged with Southey’s political prejudices, and contained the most bitter sentiments towards all who differed from his views; they provoked much animosity and ridicule at the time, and would soon have passed into utter oblivion, but for the satires and parodies they gave rise to.
Of these Lord Byron’s Vision of Judgment was, of course, the most powerful, in it the Laureate received a mercilessly witty castigation, which even his admirers admitted to be not altogether unmerited, as he had gone out of his way to attack those who had done him no wrong.
The mere fact of Southey’s complete change of opinions on political and social affairs would not, in itself, have been sufficient to account for the violence of the attacks to which he was subjected. It was not only that he turned from being an ardent Republican and a Communist, to a staunch Royalist and supporter of the Aristocratic form of government, but the change came at a time when party feeling ran very high, when the great body of the people were suffering sore distress, and when his own prospects, pecuniary and social, were greatly benefitted by deserting what was then known as the popular cause.
Further, he at once proceeded with all the ardour of a pervert to violently attack all who held similar views to those he had but so lately upheld, and advised that the most severely repressive measures should betaken against them, which caused Byron to address him thus, in the opening lines of Don Juan:
Bob Southey! you’re a poet—Poet-Laureate,