[78] “Dilworth and Dyche are both mad at thy quantities.” See Mr. Canning’s Parody on Mr. Southey’s Dactylics.
[79] Not only in “Seditious Sapphics,” but in divers kinds of verse “without a name,” happily unknown to English Poetry, before Mr. Southey.
[80] “Botany Bay Eclogues,” written in the Laureate’s youth, full of thefts and theories worthy of the Bay, though the poetry certainly is not.
[81] “Joan of Arc,” Mr. S. says, was written in six weeks, It may be so—it is easier to write than to read such an epic.
[82] “Thalaba, the destroyer,” a hotch-potch of all the measures in the English (and a few more) without rhyme. The catastrophe is precisely that of Tom Thumb.
[83] “Madoc,” a moral quarto, in which whatever is good for anything is stolen without acknowledgment from Robertson’s History of America, whose elegant prose Mr. Southey has traduced into barbarous blank, in applying all the striking incidents in the story of Columbus, to a buccaneering Welsh Chieftain of the 12th century.
[84] “Roderick the last of the Goths.”
[85] “Wat Tyler” was republished about the time Mr. S. suffered the Laurel—which gave rise to some edifying and curious contrasts of his new and old opinions.
[86] Mr. S. is guilty of sundry odes to the Holy Alliance, &c., &c.
[87] “Letter to W. Smith, M.P., from R. Southey, Esq.” of the contents of which most of our readers are in a state of happy ignorance—for the publisher, Mr. Murray, is the only person who suffered from Mr. S.’s “branding iron.” It was said of Joe Manton’s guns, that they were not sold but given away. As much might Mr. Murray say of this famous Letter, except that nothing of the Laureate’s resembles the said Joe’s in readiness to go off.