This is very unlike Mr. Burke’s celebrated ‘Letter to the Duke of Bedford.’ The last is the only work of the Irish orator and patriot, in which he was in earnest, and all that he wanted was sincerity. The attack made upon his pension, by rousing his self-love, kindled his imagination, and made him blaze out in a torrent of fiery eloquence, in the course of which his tilting prose-Pegasus darted upon the titles of the noble duke like a thunderbolt, reversed his ancestral honours, overturned the monstrous straddle-legged figure of that legitimate monarch, Henry VIII., exploded the mines of the French revolution, kicked down the Abbé Sieyes’s pigeon-holes full of constitutions, and only reposed from his whirling career, in that fine retrospect on himself, and the affecting episode to Admiral Keppel. Mr. Burke was an apostate, ‘a malignant renegado,’ like Mr. Southey; but there the comparison ends. He would not have been content, on such an occasion as the present, with Mistering his opponent, and Esquiring himself, like the ladies in the Beggar’s Opera, who express the height of their rankling envy and dislike, by calling each other—Madam. Mr. Southey’s self-love, when challenged to the lists, does not launch out into the wide field of wit or argument: it retires into its own littleness, collects all its slender resources in one poor effort of pert, pettifogging spite, makes up by studied malice for conscious impotence, and attempts to mortify others by the angry sense of his own insignificance. He grows tenacious of his ridiculous pretensions, in proportion as they are given up by every body else. His self-complacency riots, with a peculiar and pointed gusto, in the universal contempt or compassion of friends and foes. In the last stage of a galloping consumption, while the last expiring puff of The Courier makes ‘a swan-like end,’ in a compliment to his opponents, he is sanguine of a deathless reputation—considers his soreness to the least touch as a proof of his being in a whole skin, and his uneasiness to repel every attack as a proof of his being invulnerable. In a word, he mistakes an excess of spleen and irritability for the consciousness of innocence, and sets up his own egotism, vanity, ill-humour, and intolerance, as an answer in full to all the objections which have been brought against him of vanity, egotism, malignity, and intolerance. His ‘Letter’ is a concentrated essence of a want of self-knowledge. It is the picture of the author’s mind in little. In this respect, it is ‘a psychological curiosity’; a study of human infirmity. As some persons bequeath their bodies to the surgeons to be dissected after their death, Mr. Southey publicly exposes his mind to be anatomized while he is living. He lays open his character to the scalping-knife, guides the philosophic hand in its painful researches, and on the bald crown of our petit tondu, in vain concealed under withered bay-leaves and a few contemptible grey hairs, you see the organ of vanity triumphant—sleek, smooth, round, perfect, polished, horned, and shining, as it were in a transparency. This is the handle of his intellect, the index of his mind; ‘the guide, the anchor of his purest thoughts, and soul of all his moral being’; the clue to the labyrinth of all his tergiversations and contradictions; the medius terminus of his political logic.
—— ——‘The ruling passion once express’d,
Wharton is plain, and Chartres stands confess’d.’
Once admit that Mr. Southey is always in the right, and every one else in the wrong, and all the rest follows. This at once reconciles ‘Wat Tyler’ and the ‘Quarterly Review,’ which Mr. William Smith took down to the House, in two different pockets for fear of a breach of the peace; identifies the poet of the ‘Joan of Arc’ and of the ‘Annual Anthology’ with the poet-laureate; and jumps the stripling into the man, whenever the latter has a mind to jump into a place or pension. Till you can deprive him of his personal identity, he will always be the same infallible person—in his own opinion. He is both judge and jury in his own cause; the sole standard of right and wrong. To differ with him is inexcusable; for ‘there is but one perfect, even himself.’ He is the central point of all moral and intellectual excellence; the way, the truth, and the life. There is no salvation out of his pale; and yet he makes the terms of communion so strict, that there is no hope that way. The crime of Mr. William Smith and others, against whom this high-priest of impertinence levels his anathemas, is in not being Mr. Southey. What is right in him, is wrong in them; what is the height of folly or wickedness in them, is, ‘as fortune and the flesh shall serve,’ the height of wisdom and virtue in him; for there is no medium in his reprobation of others and approbation of himself. Whatever he does, is proper: whatever he thinks, is true and profound: ‘I, Robert Shallow, Esquire, have said it.’ Whether Jacobin or Anti-jacobin, Theophilanthropist or Trinitarian, Spencean, or Ex-Spencean, the patron of Universal Suffrage or of close Boroughs, of the reversion of sinecure places, and pensions, or of the abolition of all property,—however extreme in one opinion or another, he alone is in the right; and those who do not think as he does, and change their opinions as he does, and go the lengths that he does, first on one side and then on the other, are necessarily knaves and fools. Wherever he sits, is the head of the table. Truth and justice are always at his side. The wise and virtuous are always with him. How should it be otherwise? He calls those ‘wise and virtuous’ who are of his way of thinking; the rest are ‘sciolists, profligates, and coxcombs.’ By a fiction of his own making, not by a fiction of the law, Mr. Southey can do no wrong; and to accuse him of it, is a libel on the face of it, and little short of high treason. It is not the poet-laureate, the author of ‘Wat Tyler’ and of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ who is to blame for his violence and apostacy; with that portion of self-sufficiency which this author possesses, ‘these are most virtuous’; but it is the person who brings forward the contradictions and intemperance of these two performances who is never to be forgiven for questioning Mr. Southey’s consistency and moderation. All this is strange, but not new to our readers. We have said it all before. Why does Mr. Southey oblige us to repeat the accusation, by furnishing us with fresh proofs of it? He is betrayed to his ruin by trusting to the dictates of his personal feelings and wounded pride; and yet he dare not look at his situation through any other medium. ‘To know my deed, ‘t were best not know myself.’ But does he expect all eyes as well as his to be ‘blind with the pin and web’? Does he pull his laurel-crown as a splendid film over his eyes, and expect us to join in a game of political blindman’s-buff with him, with a ‘Hoop, do me no harm, good man’? Are we not to cry out while an impudent, hypocritical, malignant renegado is putting his gag in our mouths, and getting his thumb-screws ready? ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale,’ says Sir Toby to the fantastical steward Malvolio? Does Mr. Southey think, because he is a pensioner, that he is to make us willing slaves? While he goes on writing in the ‘Quarterly,’ shall we give over writing in The Examiner? Before he puts down the liberty of the press, the press shall put him down, with all his hireling and changeling crew. In the servile war which Mr. Southey tells us is approaching, the service we have proposed to ourselves to do is, to neutralize the servile intellect of the country. This we have already done in part, and hope to make clear work of it, before we have done.—For example:
This heroic epistle to William Smith, Esq. from Robert Southey, sets off in the following manner:—
‘Sir,—You are represented in the newspapers as having entered, during an important discussion in parliament, into a comparison between certain passages in the ‘Quarterly Review,’ and the opinions which were held by the author of ‘Wat Tyler’ three-and-twenty years ago. It appears farther, according to the same authority, that the introduction of so strange a criticism, in so strange a place, did not arise from the debate, but was a premeditated thing; that you had prepared yourself for it, by stowing the ‘Quarterly Review’ in one pocket, and ‘Wat Tyler’ in the other; and that you deliberately stood up for the purpose of reviling an individual who was not present to vindicate himself, and in a place which afforded you protection.’ p. 2.
So that for Mr. William Smith in a debate on a bill for the suppression of all political opinions (as we are told by Mr. Alderman Smith, a very different person, to be sure, and according to Mr. Southey, no doubt, a highly respectable character, and a true lover of liberty and the constitution) for Mr. William Smith on such an occasion to introduce the sentiments of a well-known writer in a public journal, that writer being a whiffling tool of the court, and that journal the avowed organ of the government-party, in confirmation of his apprehensions of the objects and probable results of the bill then pending, was quite irrelevant and unparliamentary; nor had Mr. William Smith any right to set an additional stigma on the unprincipled and barefaced lengths which this writer now goes in servility and intolerance, by shewing the equal lengths to which he went formerly in popular fanaticism and licentiousness. Yet neither Mr. Southey nor his friend Mr. Wynne complained of Mr. Canning’s want of regularity, or disrespect of the House, in lugging out of his pocket The Spencean Plan as an argument against Reform, and as decisive of the views of the Friends of Reform in parliament. Nay, Mr. Southey requoted Mr. Canning’s quotation, for the purpose of reviling all Reform and all Reformers, in the ‘Quarterly Review’;—a place in which any one so reviled can no more defend himself than Mr. Southey can defend himself in parliament; and which it seems affords equal ‘protection’ to those who avail themselves of it; for a Quarterly Reviewer, according to Mr. Southey, being anonymous, is not at all accountable for what he writes. He says,—
‘As to the “Quarterly Review,” you can have no other authority for ascribing any particular paper in that journal to one person or to another, than common report. The “Quarterly Review” stands upon its own merits.’ [Yet it was for what Mr. Southey wrote in that Review, that The Courier told us at the time that Mr. Southey was made Poet-laureate.] ‘What I may have said or thought in any part of my life, no more concerns that journal than it does you or the House of Commons.’ [What Mr. Southey has said publicly any where in any part of his life, concerns the public and every man in it, unless Mr. Southey means to say that his opinions are utterly worthless and contemptible, a piece of modesty of which we cannot suspect him.] ‘What I have written in it is a question which you, Sir, have no right to ask, and which certainly I will not answer. As little right have you to take that for granted which you cannot possibly know.’ Now mark. In the very paragraph before the one in which he skulks from the responsibility of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ and with pert vapid assurance repels every insinuation implying a breach of his inviolability as an anonymous writer, he makes an impudent, unqualified, and virulent attack on Mr. Brougham as an Edinburgh Reviewer, ‘This was not necessary in regard to Mr. Brougham ... he only carried the quarrels as well as the practices of the Edinburgh Review into the House of Commons. But as calumny, Sir, has not been your vocation, it may be useful, even to yourself, if I comment upon your first attempt.’—p. 3. Such a want of common logic is to our literal capacities quite inexplicable: it is ‘in the third tier of wonders above wonders.’
In page 5, Mr. Southey calls the person who published ‘Wat Tyler’ ‘a skulking scoundrel,’ with his characteristic delicacy and moderation in the use of epithets; and says that it was published, ‘for the avowed purpose of insulting him, and with the hope of injuring him if possible.’ Perhaps one object was to prevent Mr. Southey from insulting and injuring other people. It was supposed that ‘Wat Tyler’ might prove an antidote to the ‘Quarterly Review’: that, ‘the healing might come from the same weapon that gave the wound’; and in this instance it has turned out so. He adds, ‘You knew that the transaction bore upon its face every character of baseness and malignity. You knew that it must have been effected either by robbery, or by breach of trust. These things, Mr. William Smith, you knew!’ [Mr. Southey at least knows no such thing, but he is here in his glory; putting a false statement into epigrammatic phraseology; bristling with horror at antithetical enormities of his own fabricating, and concluding with that formidable and significant repetition of the title, Christian and surname of Mr. William Smith.] The above paragraph concludes thus, with the author’s usual logical precision and personal modesty. ‘And knowing them as you did, I verily believe, that if it were possible to revoke what is irrevocable, you would at this moment be far more desirous of blotting from remembrance the disgraceful speech which stands upon record in your name, than I should be of cancelling the boyish composition which gave rise to it. “Wat Tyler” is full of errors ... but they are the errors of youth and ignorance; they bear no indication of an ungenerous spirit, or of a malevolent heart.’ p. 6. It seems by this passage that any attempt to fix disgrace on Mr. Southey only, recoils upon the head of his accuser. ‘Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit.’ He says that Mr. W. Smith’s disgraceful speech was occasioned by ‘Wat Tyler.’ That is not true. It was occasioned by ‘Wat Tyler’ coupled with the ‘Quarterly Review.’ He says, ‘“Wat Tyler” is full of errors.’ So is the article in the ‘Quarterly Review’; but they are not ‘the errors of youth and ignorance; they bear strong indications of an ungenerous spirit and a malignant heart.’ Let not Mr. Southey mistake. It is not the indiscreet and romantic extravagance of the boy which has brought the man into this predicament: it is the deliberate and rancorous servility of the man that has made those who were the marks of his slanderous and cowardly invectives, rake up the errors of his youth against him.
Mr. Southey next proceeds to a defence of himself for writing ‘the Wat Tyler.’ He argues that ‘it is not seditious, because it is dramatic.’ We deny that it is dramatic. He acknowledges that it is mischievous, and particularly so, at the present time. To the last part of the proposition we cannot assent. When this poem was written, there was a rage of speculation which might be dangerous: the danger at present arises from the rage of hunger. And the true reason why Mr. Southey was eager to suppress this publication was not what he pretends, a fear that it might inculcate notions of perfect equality and general licentiousness: but a feeling that it might prevent him from defending every abuse of excessive inequality, and every stretch of arbitrary power, the end of which must be to sink ‘the people’ in an abyss of slavery, and to plunge ‘the populace’ in the depths of famine, despair, and misery, or by a sudden and tremendous revulsion, to occasion all that confusion, anarchy, violence, and bloodshed, which Mr. Southey hypocritically affects to deprecate as the consequences of seditious and inflammatory publications. Now we contend in opposition to Mr. Southey and all that servile crew, that the only possible preventive of one or other of these impending evils, namely, lasting slavery, famine, and general misery on the one hand, or a sudden and dreadful convulsion on the other, is the liberty of the press, which Mr. Southey calls sedition, and the firm, manly, and independent expression of public opinion, which he calls rebellion. We detest despotism: we deprecate popular commotion: but if we are forced upon an alternative, we have a choice: we prefer temporary to lasting evils. Mr. Southey has indeed a new-acquired and therefore lively dread of the horrors of revolution. But his passion for despotism is greater than his dread of anarchy; and he runs all the risks of the one, rather than not glut his insatiable and unnatural appetite for the other. Such are his politics, and such are ours. He says, ‘The piece was written under the influence of opinions which I have long since outgrown, and repeatedly disclaimed, but for which I have never felt either shame or contrition. They were taken up conscientiously in early youth, they were acted upon in disregard of all worldly considerations, and they were left behind in the same strait-forward course, as I advanced in years.’ The latter part of this statement is not self-evident. Mr. Southey says that while he adhered to his first principles, he acted with a total disregard of his worldly interest; and this is easily understood:—but that his desertion of those principles, so contrary to his worldly views, was equally independent, disinterested and free from sinister motives, is not so plain. Nor can we take Mr. Southey’s word for it. And we will tell him the reason. If he had been progressive, as he calls it, in his course, up to the year 1814, we should not have found much fault with him: but why did he become stationary then? Has nothing happened in the three last years,—nothing—to make Mr. Southey retreat back to some of his old opinions, as he had advanced from them, guided, as he professes to be in his undeviating course, by facts and experience? Are the actual events of the last three years nothing in the scale of Mr. Southey’s judgment? Is not their weight overpowering, irresistible? What, do not the names of Poland, Norway, Finland, Saxony, Italy, Spain and Portugal, the Pope, the Inquisition, and the Cortes (to say nothing of France, Nismes, and the Bourbons) thrown into the scale of common sense and common honesty, dash it down, with a startling sound, upon the counter, where Mr. Southey is reckoning his well-gotten gains, the price of his disinterested exertions in the cause of Spanish liberty and the deliverance of mankind, making his hair stand on end at his own folly and credulity, and forcing him indignantly to fling his last year’s pension and the arrears of the Quarterly in the face of Mr. Murray’s shopmen and the clerks of the Treasury, and swear, ‘in disregard of all worldly considerations,’ never to set his foot in Downing or Albemarle-street again? No such thing. In advocating the cause of the French people, Mr. Southey’s principles and his interest were at variance, and therefore he quitted his principles when he saw a good opportunity: in taking up the cause of the Allies, his principles and his interest became united and thenceforth indissoluble. His engagement to his first love, the Republic, was only upon liking; his marriage to Legitimacy is for better, for worse, and nothing but death shall part them. Our simple Laureate was sharp upon his hoyden Jacobin mistress, who brought him no dowry, neither place nor pension, who ‘found him poor and kept him so,’ by her prudish notions of virtue. He divorced her, in short, for nothing but the spirit and success with which she resisted the fraud and force to which the old bawd Legitimacy was forever resorting to overpower her resolution and fidelity. He said she was a virago, a cunning gipsey, always in broils about her honour and the inviolability of her person, and always getting the better in them, furiously scratching the face or cruelly tearing off the hair of the said pimping old lady, who would never let her alone, night or day. But since her foot slipped one day on the ice, and the detestable old hag tripped up her heels, and gave her up to the kind keeping of the Allied Sovereigns, Mr. Southey has devoted himself to her more fortunate and wealthy rival: he is become uxorious in his second matrimonial connexion; and though his false Duessa has turned out a very witch, a foul, ugly witch, drunk with insolence, mad with power, a griping, rapacious wretch, bloody, luxurious, wanton, malicious, not sparing steel, or poison, or gold, to gain her ends—bringing famine, pestilence, and death in her train—infecting the air with her thoughts, killing the beholders with her looks, claiming mankind as her property, and using them as her slaves—driving every thing before her, and playing the devil wherever she comes, Mr. Southey sticks to her in spite of every thing, and for very shame lays his head in her lap, paddles with the palms of her hands, inhales her hateful breath, leers in her eyes and whispers in her ears, calls her little fondling names, Religion, Morality, and Social Order, takes for his motto,