Under his huge legs.’

‘His name, in the mean time, has served in London for the very shuttlecock of discussion.’ Why should not his name be a shuttlecock, when he himself is no better?—‘He has impeded the rising reputation of Toby, the Sapient Pig;’—has overlaid the posthumous birth of the young Shiloh, and perhaps prevented Mr. Coleridge’s premature deliverance of his last Lay Sermon. After all these misfortunes, the author makes merry with Bonaparte’s ‘having been exposed, like Bishop Hatto, to be devoured by the rats!’ The levelling rogue cares neither for Bishops nor Emperors, but grows grave again in recounting the retrograde progress of his own mind.

‘In my youth, when my stock of knowledge consisted of such an acquaintance with Greek and Roman history, as is acquired in the course of a regular scholastic education,’—[The Greek and Roman history is as good as the history of rotten boroughs or the reign of George III.]—‘when my heart was full of poetry and romance,—[Is it so no longer?]—‘and Lucan and Akenside were at my tongue’s end.’—[Instead of the red book and the court calendar]—‘I fell into the political opinions which the French Revolution was then scattering throughout Europe:’ [We have here a pretty fair account of the origin and genealogy of the opinions of the French Revolution, which opinions of liberty, truth, and justice, neither the French Revolution shall destroy, nor those who destroyed it, because it was produced by and gave birth to those opinions; and does Mr. Southey suppose that the suppression of Wat Tyler is to suppress those opinions, and that a lying article in the Quarterly Review is to persuade us that they who made war on those opinions from the beginning (and by so doing, produced all the evils of those opinions, produced them purposely, in the malice of their hearts and the darkness of their minds produced them to destroy all liberty, truth, and justice, and to keep mankind their slaves in perpetuity by right divine) were right from the beginning, that they deserved well of mankind, that their boasted triumph, the triumph of kings over the species, is ours and Mr. Southey’s triumph? Or would he persuade us that the Greek and Roman History has become obsolete, because Mr. Southey left school three and twenty years ago; that poetry and romance were banished from the human heart when he took a place and pension; that Lucan and Akenside will not live as long as Wat Tyler, or the Quarterly Review!—We broke off in an interesting part. Mr. Southey proceeds:]—‘Following those opinions with ardour wherever they led.’ [This is an old trick of the author, he is a keen sportsman;] ‘I soon perceived that inequalities of rank were a light evil compared to the inequalities of property,[[36]] and those more fearful distinctions which the want of moral and intellectual culture occasions between man and man. At that time, and with those opinions or rather feelings (for their root was in the heart, and not in the understanding) I wrote Wat Tyler as one who was impatient of “all the oppressions that are done under the sun.”’ [Here we must make another full stop.] Mr. Southey is incapable of forming any other opinions but from his feelings: he never had any other opinions, he never will have any others, worth a rush. When the opinions he professes ceased to be the dictates of his heart, they became the dictates of his vanity and interest; they became good for nothing. When the first ebullition of youthful ardour was over, his understanding was not competent to maintain its independence against the artifices of sophistry, aided by the accumulating force of ‘worldly considerations,’ showy or substantial, the long neglect of which he had felt to his cost. Mr. Southey’s pure reason was not steady enough to contemplate the truth in an unprejudiced and unimpassioned point of view. His imagination first ran away with his understanding; and now, that he is getting old, his convenience, the influence of fashion, and the tide of opinion, rush in, and fill up all the void both of sense and imagination, driving him into the very vortex of court-sycophancy, the sinks and common sewers of corruption. Mr. Southey is not a man to hear reason at any time of his life. He thinks his change of opinion is owing to an increase of knowledge, because he has in fact no idea of any progress in intellect but exchanging one error for another. He has no idea that a man may grow wiser in the same opinion by discovering new reasons for the faith that is in him; for Mr. Southey has no reasons for the faith that is in him. He does not see how a man may devote his whole life to the discovery of the principle of the most common truth; for he has no principles of thought, either to guide, enlarge, or modify his knowledge. He has nothing to shew for the wisdom of his opinions but his own opinion of their wisdom: they are mere self-opinions: he considers his present notions as profound and solid, because his former ones were hasty and shallow; asserts them with pert, vapid assurance, because he does not see the objections against them; and thinks he must be right in his premises in proportion to the violence and extravagance of his conclusions. Because when he wrote Wat Tyler, he was ‘impatient of all the oppressions that are done under the sun,’ he now thinks it his bounden duty to justify them all, with equal impatience of contradiction. Mr. Southey does not know himself so well as we do; and a greater confirmation of his ignorance in this respect cannot well be given than the rest of the above passage. ‘The subject of Wat Tyler was injudiciously chosen; and it was treated as might be expected by a youth of twenty, in such times, who regarded only one side of the question.’ [It is Mr. Southey’s fault or his misfortune that at all times he regards only one side of a question.]

‘There is no other misrepresentation. The sentiments of the historical characters are correctly stated.’ [What, of the King, the Judge, and the Archbishop?] ‘Were I now to dramatize the same story, there would be much to add, but little to alter. I should not express those sentiments less strongly, but I should oppose to them more enlarged views of the nature of man and the progress of society. I should set forth with equal force the oppressions of the feudal system, the excesses of the insurgents, and the treachery of the government,’ [Doctors doubt that] ‘and hold up the errors and crimes which were then committed, as a warning for this and for future generations. I should write as a man; not as a stripling; with the same heart, and the same desires, but with a ripened understanding and competent stores of knowledge,’ p. 15. Let him do it, but he dare not. He would shew by the attempt the hollowness of his boasted independence, the little time-serving meanness of his most enlarged views; in a word, that he has still the same understanding, but no longer the same heart. What are ‘the ripened discoveries and competent stores of knowledge’ which Mr. Southey would bring to this task? Are they the barefaced self-evident sophistries, the wretched shuffling evasions of common-sense and humanity which he contributes to the Quarterly Review, the cast-off, thread-bare, tattered excuses of Paley’s Moral Philosophy, and Windham’s hashed-up speeches? Why, all the prodigious discoveries which Mr. Southey there details with such dry significance, are familiar to every school-boy, are the common stock in trade of every spouter at a debating society, have been bandied about, hackneyed, exhausted any time these thirty years! And yet Mr. Southey was quite ignorant of them till very lately; they have broke upon him with a new and solemn light; they have come upon him by surprise, after three-and-twenty years; and at the last rebound, have overturned his tottering patriotism? Where is the use of Mr. Southey’s regular scholastic education, if he is to be thus ignorant at twenty, thus versatile at forty? The object of such an education is to make men less astonished at their own successive discoveries, by putting them in possession before-hand of what has been discovered by others. Mr. Southey cannot, like Mr. Cobbett, plead in extenuation of his change of sentiment, that he was a self-taught man, who had to grope his way from error and prejudice to truth and reason; neither can he plead like Mr. Cobbett, in proof of the sincerity of his motives, that he has suffered the loss of liberty and property by his change of opinion: Mr. Southey has suffered nothing by his—but a loss of character!

A Letter to William Smith, Esq. M.P. from Robert Southey, Esq. John Murray, Albemarle-street. 1817. Price 2s.

(CONCLUDED.)

May 18, 1817.

Mr. Southey in the next paragraph says, that, ‘it is a nice question, in what degree he, as the author, partook of the sentiments expressed in the dramatic poem of Wat Tyler;—too nice a one for Mr. Wm. Smith to decide;’ and yet he accuses him of excessive malice or total want of judgment for deciding wrong. He then falls foul of the Monthly, and other Dissenting Reviews, for praising his Joan of Arc, and makes it the subject of a sneer at Mr. W. Smith, that his Minor Poems were praised by the same critical authorities on their first appearance. We might ask here, Did not Mr. Southey himself write in these Reviews at one time? But he might refuse to answer the question. ‘In these productions, Joan of Arc,’ &c. Mr. Southey observes, and observes truly, that Mr. W. Smith ‘might have seen expressed an enthusiastic love of liberty,’ (not a cold-blooded recommendation to extinguish the liberty of the press) ‘a detestation of tyranny in whatever form,’ (legitimate or illegitimate, not a palliation of all its most inveterate and lasting abuses) ‘an ardent abhorrence of all wicked ambition,’ (particularly of that most wicked ambition which would subject mankind, as a herd of cattle, to the power and pride of Kings) ‘and a sympathy not less ardent with those who were engaged in war for the defence of their country, and in a righteous cause’—to wit, the French!

Mr. Southey, however, vindicates with still more self-complacency and success, the purity of his religious and moral character. ‘For while I imbibed the Republican opinions of the day, I escaped the atheism and leprous immorality which generally accompanied them. I cannot, therefore, join with Beattie in blessing

——“The hour when I escap’d the wrangling crew,