Having fewer errors to plead guilty to, he is less « The variety and piquancy of his writings form a striking contrast to the mode in which they are produced. He rises early, and writes or reads till He writes or reads after near breakfast-time. breakfast till dinner, after dinner till tea, and from tea till bed-time soever, The inveteracy with which Lord Byron satirised Mr Southey is a matter of equal regret and notoriety: we believe that the only answer Southey ever made to these criticisms, was in a letter addressed to the Editor of the Courier newspaper, which, with the provocatory remarks of his Lordship, we give here:-« Mr Southey, too, in his pious preface to a poem whose blasphemy is as harmless as the sedition of Wat Tyler, because it is equally absurd with that sincere production, calls upon the legislature to look to it,' as the toleration of such writings led to the French Revolution: not such writings as Wat Tyler, but as those of the Satanic School.' This is not true, and Mr Southey knows it to be not true. Every French writer of any freedom was persecuted; Voltaire and Rousseau were exiles; Marmontel and Diderot were sent to the Bastille; and a perpetual war was waged with the whole class by the existing despotism. In the next place, the French Revolution was not occasioned by any writings whatbut must have occurred had no such writings ever existed. It is the fashion to attribute every thing to the French Revolution, and the French Revolution to every thing but its real That cause is obvious-the government cause. exacted too much, and the people could neither Without this, the Encyclogive nor bear more. pedists might have written their fingers off without the occurrence of a single alteration. And the English Revolution (the first, I mean)—what was it occasioned by? The Puritans were surely on Derwent's banks, beneath the foot of Skiddaw. as pious and moral as Wesley or his biographer. Acts-acts on the part of government, and not Study serves him for business, exercise, recreation. He passes from verse to prose, from his-writings against them, have caused the past contory to poetry, from reading to writing, by a vulsions, and are tending to the future. stop-watch. He writes a fair hand, without blots, upon such as inevitable, though no revolutionist: sitting upright in his chair, leaves off when he I wish to see the English constitution restored, and comes to the bottom of the page, and changes not destroyed. Born an aristocrat, and naturally one by temper, with the greater part of my prethe subject for another, as opposite as the antipodes. His mind is after all rather the recipient sent property in the funds, what have I to gain and transmitter of knowledge, than the origina- by a revolution? Perhaps I have more to lose in tor of it. He has hardly grasp of thought enough every way than Mr Southey, with all his places to arrive at any great leading truth. His pas- and presents for panegyrics and abuse into the sions do not amount to more than irritability. | bargain. But that a revolution is inevitable, I With some gall in his pen, and coldness in his repeat. The government may exult over the he has a great deal of kindness in his repression of petty tumults; these are the reRash in his opinions, he is steady in his ceding waves repulsed and broken for a moment attachments-and is a man in many particulars on the shore, while the great tide is still rolling admirable, in all respectable—his political incon- on and gaining with every breaker. Mr Southey accuses us of attacking the religion of the counsistency alone excepted!» try; and is he abetting it by writing lives of Wesley? One mode of worship is merely destroyed by another. There never was, nor ever will be, a country without a religion. We shall be told of France again, but it was only Paris and a frantic party, which for a moment upheld manner, heart. And follows so the ever-running year, Such is the homage that even a political as well as a critical opponent of Robert Southey found himself constrained to pay to his exemplary and -to his good irreproachable private character and guileless heart : Incoctum generoso pectus honesto. I look their dogmatic nonsense of theophilanthropy. note from a work of a Mr Landor, the author of The Church of England, if overthrown, will be Gebir,' whose friendship for Robert Southey will, swept away by the sectarians, and not by the it seems, 'be an honour to him when the ephe- ¦ sceptics. People are too wise, too well informed, meral disputes and ephemeral reputations of the too certain of their own immense importance in day are forgotten.' I for one neither envy him the realms of space, ever to submit to the impiety the friendship,' nor the glory in reversion which of doubt. There may be a few such diffident spe- is to accrue from it, like Mr Thelluson's fortune, culators, like water in the pale sunbeam of hu- in the third and fourth generation. This friendman reason, but they are very few, and their ship will probably be as memorable as his own opinions, without enthusiasm or appeal to the epics, which (as I quoted to him ten or twelve passions, can never gain proselytes-unless, in-years ago in English Bards') Porson said would; deed, they are persecuted-that, to be sure, will be remembered when Homer and Virgil are for- ! increase any thing. Mr S., with a cowardly fero-gotten, and not till then.' For the present, I 6 Sir, MR SOUTHEY'S REPLY. To city, exults over the anticipated 'death-bed re- leave him." pentance' of the objects of his dislike; and indulges himself in a pleasant 'Vision of Judg ment,' in prose as well as verse, full of impious impudence. What Mr S.'s sensations or ours may be in the awful moment of leaving this state HAVING seen in the newspapers a note of existence, neither he nor we can pretend to relating to myself, extracted from a recent publidecide. In common, I presume, with most men cation of Lord Byron's,' I request permission to of any reflection, I have not waited for a death-reply through the medium of your journal. I bed' to repent of many of my actions, notwith-come at once to his Lordship's charge against me, standing the diabolical pride' which this pitiful blowing away the abuse with which it is frothed, renegade in his rancour would impute to those and evaporating a strong acid in which it is suswho scorn him. Whether, upon the whole, the pended. The residuum then appears to be, that good or evil of my deeds may preponderate, it is 'Mr Southey, on his return from Switzerland (in not for me to ascertain; but, as my means and 1817), scattered abroad calumnies, knowing them opportunities have been greater, I shall limit my to be such, against Lord Byron and others.' present defence to an assertion (easily proved, if this I reply with a direct and positive denial. If necessary), that I, 'in my degree,' have done I had been told in that country that Lord Byron more real good in any one given year, since I was had turned Turk, or monk of La Trappe,—that twenty, than Mr Southey in the whole course of he had furnished a haram, or endowed an hospihis shifting and turncoat existence. There are tal, I might have thought the account, whichever several actions to which I can look back with an it had been, possible, and repeated it accordinghonest pride, not to be damped by the calumnies ly; passing it, as it had been taken in the small of a hireling. There are others to which I recur change of conversation, for no more than what it with sorrow and repentance; but the ouly act of was worth. In this manner I might have spoken my life of which Mr Southey can have any real of him, as of Baron Gerambe, the Green Man, knowledge, as it was one which brought me in the Indian Jugglers, or any other figurante of the contact with a near connexion of his own, did time being. There was no reason for any partino dishonour to that connexion, nor to me. 1 cular delicacy on my part in speaking of his am not ignorant of Mr Southey's calumnies on a Lordship; and, indeed, I should have thought different occasion, knowing them to be such, any thing which might be reported of him, would which he scattered abroad on his return from have injured his character as little as the story Switzerland against me and others: they have which so greatly annoyed Lord Keeper Guildford, done him no good in this world; and if his creed that he had ridden a rhinoceros. He may ride a be the right one, they will do him less in the rhinoceros: and though every body would stare, What his death-bed' may be, it is not no one would wonder. my province to predicate: let him settle it with his Maker, as I must do with mine. There is something at once ludicrous and blasphemous in this arrogant scribbler of all work sitting down to deal damnation and destruction upon his fellow-creatures, with Wat Tyler, the Apotheosis of George the Third, and the Elegy on Marten the regicide, all shuffled together in his writing-desk. One of his consolations appears to be a Latin next. But making no inquiry concerning him when I was abroad, because I felt no curiosity, I heard nothing, and had nothing to repeat. When I spoke of wonders to my friends and acquaintance on my return, it was of the flying-tree at Alpuacht, and the eleven thousand virgins at Cologne not of Lord Byrou. I sought for no staler sub The Two Foscari. Ject than St Ursula. Once, and only once, in connexion with Switzerland, I have alluded to his Lordship; and as the passage was curtailed in the press, I take this opportunity of restoring it. In the Quarterly Review, speaking incidentally of the Jungfrau, I said, 'It was the scene where Lord Byron's Manfred met the Devil and bullied him-though the Devil must have won his cause before any tribunal in this world or the next, if he had not pleaded more feebly for himself, than his advocate, in a cause of canonization, ever pleaded for him.' With regard to the 'others,' whom his Lordship accuses me of calumniating, I suppose he alludes to a party of his friends, whose names I found written in the Album at Mont Auvert, with an avowal of atheism annexed in Greek, and an indignant comment in the same language underneath it. Those names, with that avowal and the comment, I transcribed in my note-book, and spoke of the circumstance on my return. If I had published it, the gentleman in question would not have thought himself slandered, by having that recorded of him which he has so often recorded of himself. The many opprobrious appellations which Lord Byron has bestowed upon me, I leave as I find them, with the praises which he has bestowed upon himself. How easily is a noble spirit discern'd From harsh and sulphurous matter, that flies out But I am accustomed to such things; and so far from irritating me are the enemies who use such weapons, that, when I hear of their attacks, it is some satisfaction to think they have thus employed the malignity which must have been employed somewhere, and could not have been directed against any person whom it could probably molest or injure less. The viper, however venomous in purpose, is harmless in effect while it is biting at the file. It is seldom, indeed, that I waste a word or a thought upon those who are perpetually assailing me. But abhorring, as I do, the personalities which disgrace our current literature, and averse from controversy as I am, both by principle and inclination, I make no profession of non-resistance. When the offence and the offender are such as to call for the whip and the branding-iron, it has been both seen and felt that I can inflict them. Lord Byron's present exacerbation is evidently produced by an infliction of this kind-not by hear-say reports of my conversation four years ago, transmitted him from England. The cause may be found in certain remarks upon the Satanic School of poetry, contained in my preface to the Vision of Judgment. satisfaction as I shall always do upon what is there said of that flagitious school. Many persons, and parents especially, have expressed their gratitude to me for having applied the brandingiron where it was so richly deserved. The Edinburgh Reviewer, indeed, with that honourable feeling by which his criticisms are so peculiarly distinguished, suppressing the remarks themselves, has imputed them wholly to envy on my part. I give him, in this instance, full credit for sincerity: I believe he was equally incapable of comprehending a worthier motive, or of inventing a worse; and as I have never coudescended to expose, in any instance, his pitiful malevolence, I thank him for having in this stript it bare himself, and exhibited it in its bald, naked, and undisguised deformity. Lord Byron, like his encomiast, has not ventured to bring the matter of those animadversions into view. He conceals the fact, that they are directed against the authors of blasphemous and lascivious books,— against men who, not content with indulging their own vices, labour to make others the slaves of sensuality like themselves,-against public panders, who, mingling impiety with lewdness, seek at once to destroy the cement of social order, and to carry profanation and pollution into private families, and into the hearts of individuals. His Lordship has thought it not unbecoming in him to call me a scribbler of all work. Let the word scribbler pass; it is not an appellation which will stick, like that of the Satanic School. But if a scribbler, how am I one of all work? I will tell Lord Byron what I have not scribbled,-what kind of work I have not done. I have never published libels upon my friends and acquaintance, expressed my sorrow for those libels, and called them in during a mood of better mind,-and then re-issued them, when the Evil Spirit, which for a time has been cast out, had returned and taken possession, with seven others more wicked than himself. I have never abused the power, of which every author is in some degree possessed, to wound the character of a man, or the heart of a woman. I have never sent into the world a book to which I did not dare affix my name, or which I feared to claim in a Court of Justice, if it were pirated by a knavish bookseller. I have never manufactured furniture for the brothel. None of these things have I done; none of the foul work by which literature is perverted to the injury of mankind. My hands are clean; there is no 'damned spot' upon them—no taint, which all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten.' Of the work which I have done, it becomes me not here to speak, save only as relates to the Satanic School, and its Coryphæus, the author of Don Juan. I have held up that school to public detestation, as enemies to the religion, the and acquirements entitle him: he is more often institutions, and the domestic morals of the coun- a listener than a talker. In this respect he diftry. I have given them a designation to which fers from Wordsworth and Coleridge, who are their founder and leader answers. I have sent a remarkable for the nervous and overwhelming stone from my sling, which has smitten their eloquence of their language. But the character Goliah in the forehead. I have fastened his of Mr Southey can only be fully estimated by name upon the gibbet for reproach and ignominy those who are intimately acquainted with him, as long as it shall endure. Take it down who in the domestic circle,-in those winter evenings can!--One word of advice to Lord Byron before so beautifully sketched by Cowper; then how I conclude. When he attacks me again, let it delightful it is to hear him! be in rhyme. For one who has so little command of himself, it will be a great advantage that his temper should be obliged to keep tune. And while he may still indulge in the same rankness and virulence of insult, the metre will, in some degree, seem to lessen its vulgarity. We shall now conclude our brief, and, we fear, very inadequate sketch, by introducing the following interesting particulars, the accuracy and authenticity of which may be fully relied on. It was this love of retirement, and distaste for the hurry and fever of public life, that induced Mr Southey to refuse the unsolicited offer of a seat in the House of Commons, to which he had been previously elected. A similar feeling induced him to fix his residence in a country in which alike the Poet finds inexhaustible food for his imagination, and the Philosopher for reflection He, on his own green banks, in solitude, By his soft murmuring lake, wanders along; And to his mountains, and his forests rude, Chaunts in sweet melody his classic song; He makes our northern wilds a paradise, Since spirits all sublime inhabit there; After Mr Southey had left college, he devoted For at his magic call what phantoms rise, himself principally to poetry. The facility and And in his voice what music floats the air! rapidity with which he composes is perhaps un- So heavenly soothing and so softly wild, equalled. Southey had burnt more verses be- The peasant deems it more than mortal lay; The tween the age of twenty and thirty than any old hermit, and the rustic child, grey With beating heart, and timid footsteps stray other poet of the present day has written during To catch the notes the zephyr wafts away.' the course of his whole life. Another remarkable feature in his character is the pliability and But though Mr Southey lives at such a distance versatility of his talents. His time is strictly eco- from the theatre of public affairs, yet few, very nomized, and every part of the day has its ap- few persons in England have had such an influpropriate employment. It is very seldom that ence over its tastes and opinions as he has. Opihe has not several literary undertakings in hand nions may differ as to the tendency of the Quarat the same time; and as soon as the hour allot-terly Review, but no one will question its efficacy; ted to one of them has elapsed, he transfers his attention, at pleasure, to that which succeeds it, and without any of that difficulty which men of genius generally experience in escaping from the domination of their glorious themes, and diverting their attention from the train of imagery which their own imagination has conjured up. and to this the pen of Mr Southey has mainly contributed. For years his articles, on an infinite variety of subjects, have instructed and amused the British nation: and he has not only proved himself a Theologian, an Historian, a Politician, and a Poet, but he has also evinced himself a master in each of these different capacities.-There is no person who collects so much from reading with so little labour as Southey. His skill in picking out the wheat from the chaff, and in arranging and digesting what is valuable, is perfectly wonderful. While others are obliged to dig and wade through a book to select what is of value, he, without any effort, and perany Other persons read, and forget: - what Mr Southey has read may be said to belong to him, and to constitute a part of himself. This may probably arise from his habit of making extracts from books during their perusal; and we may cite his example against the assertion of Gibbon, that what is twice read, is better remembered haps half asleep upon his sofa, tears out the heart of a book, of which he scareely appears Hence the wonderful comthat his neat and careful handwriting may have to skin the surface. contributed something to the adoption and uti-pass of his knowledge upon all subjects. lity of his practice. than what is once written. » We may also add In large and mixed societies Mr Southey does not often assume the place to which his talents The above lines were written, and addressed to Mr Southey, some years ago, by an English lady, of considera ble taste and talent, resident in France. Mr Southey's library, though not extensive, is very curious, which may account in some degree for his antiquarian knowledge. His acquaintance with modern languages is extensive, but not accurate, as might be inferred from his manner of reading. It has been made matter of accusation against our author, that his opinions on political subjects were formerly very different from what they are at present. While we admit the truth of the statement, we cannot acknowledge the justice of the charge. Whether he was right formerly, and wrong now, or whether the contrary is the case,-is a question in which we have no wish to interfere. But he has a right to claim from his adversaries, that they convict him of some motive, by which he was, and ought not to have been, influenced,- -some dream of ambition, some avenue to aggrandisement. Until they can do this, they may regret, but they cannot blame his determination.2 The progress of the French revolution, with the intoxicating and visionary hopes which attended its commencement, and the violent re-action produced on his own mind by the rapid and shifting succession of events, have been powerfully sketched by Mr Wordsworth, in the third and fourth books of the «Excursion,» and in them, also, we may trace the causes which produced the change in the political principles of his friend, Mr Southey. On this subject we cannot but refer to Mr Southey's spirited and eloquent letter to William Smith, Esq., M. P. for the city of Norwich. Mr Southey's income proceeds almost entirely from the productions of his pen. He writes both for the Quarterly Review and the Foreign Quarterly, and receives a hundred pounds for every article in each. It is a fact, which our feelings will not allow us to suppress, that Mrs Coleridge, her daughter, and Mrs Lovel rely entirely upon him for support. His kindness towards them does him the highest honour, and can only be appreciated by those who know him.-His residence is on the banks of the Greta, and about a quarter of a mile from the beautiful and picturesque Derwentwater.' Here he resides nearly all the year, except during the Spring, when an annual attack of asthma frequently obliges him to suspend his literary labours, and sometimes to take refuge in Holland. Mr Southey aud Mr Wordsworth have continued an uninterrupted friendship since they were young men; and, as their houses are within twelve miles of each other, the intercourse between the two families is constant. As a friend and a neighbour universally beloved; accessible and courteous to the many strangers who are attracted to Keswick by the celebrity of his name; there exists not a man who, with all the greatness of genius, has fewer of its frailties than ROBERT SOUTHEY. Here he may often be seen in his small skiff, rowed by the fair hands of his two daughters. |