When it shall blaze with sun-surpassing splendor, More savage than the priests of Moloch taught, The ray of truth shall emanate around, This will do. THE COURIER AND "THE WAT TYLER." Doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth, that he cannot endure in his age. Shall quips and sentences, and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humour?-Much Ado about Nothing. March 30, 1817. INSTEAD of applying for an injunction against Wat Tyler, Mr. Southey would do well to apply for an injunction against Mr. Coleridge, who has undertaken his defence in The Courier. If he can escape from the ominous patronage of that gentleman's pen, he has nothing to fear from his own. "The Wat Tyler," as Mr. Coleridge has personified it, can do the author no great harm it only proves that he was once a wild enthusiast of the two characters, for which Mr. Southey is a candidate with the public, this is the most creditable for him to appear in. At present his reputation "somewhat smacks." A strong dose of the Jacobin spirit of Wat Tyler may be of use to get the sickly taste of the Poet-laureate and the Quarterly Reviewer out of our mouths. The best thing for Mr. Southey (if we might be allowed to advise) would be for his friends to say nothing about him, and for him to say nothing about other people. We have nothing to do C with Mr. Southey "the man," or even with Mr. Southey the apostate; but we have something to do with Mr. Southey the spy and informer. Is it not a little strange, that while this gentleman is getting an injunction against himself as the author of Wat Tyler, he is recommending gagging bills against us, and the making up by force for his deficiency in argument! There is a want of keeping in this; but Mr. Southey and his friends delight in practical and speculative contradictions. What are we to think of a man who is "now a flagitious incendiary," (to use the epithets which Mr. Southey applies to the Editor of the Examiner) "a palliater of murder, insurrection, and treason," and anon a pensioned scribbler of court poetry and court politics? If the writer of the article on Parliamentary Reform thinks the Editor of this Paper "a flagitious incendiary," "a palliater of murder, insurrection, and treason," what does the Quarterly Reviewer think of the author of Wat Tyler? What, on the other hand, does the author of Wat Tyler think of the Quarterly Reviewer? What does Mr. Southey, who certainly makes a very aukward figure between the two, think of himself? Mr. Coleridge indeed steps in to the assistance of his friend in this dilemma, and says (unsaying all that he says besides) that the ultra-jacobinical opinions advanced in Wat Tyler were more an honour to the writer's heart than an imputation on his understanding ?" Be it so. The Editor of this Paper will, we dare say, agree to this statement from disinterested motives, (for he is not answerable for any ultra-jacobinical opinions) as we suppose Mr. Southey will accede to it from pure self-love. He hardly thinks that he was a knave and fool" formerly, as he calls all those who formerly agreed or now differ with him: he only thinks with Mr. Coleridge and The Courier, that he was not quite so "wise and virtuous" then, as he is at present! Why then not extend the same charitable interpretation to those who have held a middle course between his opposite extravagances? We are sure, that to be thought a little less wise and virtuous than that celebrated person thinks himself, would content the ambition of any moderate man. Will he allow of nothing short of the utmost intolerance of jacobinism or anti-jacobinism? Or will he tolerate this intolerance in nobody but himself? This seems to be his feeling and it also seems to be Mr. Coleridge's opinion, whose maudlin methodistical casuistry leads him to clothe Mr. Southey's political sins with apostacy as with a garment, and to plead one excess of folly and indecency as a competent set-off against another. To be a renegado, is, with him, to be virtuous. The greater the sinner the greater the saint, says The Courier. Mr. Southey's Muse is confessedly not a vestal; but then she is what is much better, a Magdalen. Now a Magdalen is a person who has returned to her first habits and notions of virtue: but Mr. Southey's laurelled Muse is at present in high court-keeping, and tosses up her nose at the very mention of reform. Nor do we think Mr. Southey has a fairer claim to the degree of respectability good-naturedly assigned him by his friends, that of a pickpocket or highwayman turned thief-taker or king's evidence; for he in fact belies his own character to blacken every honest principle, and takes the government reward for betraying better men than himself. There are, as The Courier observes, youthful indiscretions; but there are also riper and more deliberate errors. A woman is more liable to prostitute her person at nineteen-a man is more likely to prostitute his understanding at forty. We do not see the exact parallel which The Courier sets up between moral repentance and political profligacy. A man, says The Courier, may surely express an abhorrence of his past vices, as of drunkenness. Yes; and he may also express a great abhorrence of his present vices, because his own opinion, as well as that of all impartial persons, condemns his conduct; but it would be curious if a man were to express a great abhorrence of his present opinions, and it is only a less degree of absurdity for a man to express a great abhorrence of his past opinions; for if he was not a hypocrite, he must have held those opinions, as he holds his present ones, because he thought them right. A man is at liberty to condemn his errors in practice as much as he pleases: it is a point agreed upon. But he is not at liberty to condemn his errors in theory at the same unmerciful rate, because many people still think them right; because it is the height of arrogance in him to assume his own forfeited opinion as the invariable standard of right and wrong, and the height of indecency to ascribe the conclusions of others to bad motives, by which he can only arraign his own. Certainly, all the presumption of indirect and dishonest motives lies against Mr. Southey's unlooked-for conversion, and not against his original principles. Will he deny this himself? He must then retract what he says in the Quarterly Review; for he there says, that "the late war was so popular for three and twenty years together, that for any one to be against it," (and much more, to be a Jacobin, as he was, half that time,) "exposed him to contempt, insult, persecution, the loss of property, and even of life." The odds, we grant, were against Mr. Southey's pure reason; they proved too much for it. According, however, to the new theory of political integrity, to be a steady, consistent, conscientious Whig or Tory, is nothing. It is the change of opinion that stamps its value on it; and the more outrageous the change, the more meritorious the stigma attached to it. It is the sacrifice of all principle, that is the triumph of corruption; it is the shameless effrontery of a desertion of the people, that is the chief recommendation to the panders of a court; it is the contempt, the grinning scorn and infamy, which is poured on all patriotism and independence, by shewing the radical baseness and fickleness of its professors in the most startling point of view, that strengthens the rotten foundations of power, by degrading human nature. Poor Bob Southey! how they laugh at him! What are the abuse and contumely which we are in the habit of bestowing upon him, compared with the cordial contempt, the flickering sneers, that play round the lips of his new-fangled friends, when they see "the Man of Humanity" decked out in the trappings of his prostitution, and feel the rankling venom of their hearts soothed by the flattering reflection that virtue and genius are mere marketable commodities! What a squeeze must that be which Mr. Canning gives the hand that wrote the Sonnet to Old Sarum, and the Defence of Rotten Boroughs in the Quarterly Review! Mr. Canning was at first suspected of being the author of this last article: no one has attributed Wat Tyler to the classical pen of that glib orator and consistent anti-jacobin. Yet what are the pretensions of that gentleman's profligate consistency opposed to Mr. Southey's profligate versatility; what a pitiful spectacle does his sneaking, servile adherence to a party make, compared with Mr. Southey's barefaced and magnanimous desertion of one! Mr. Canning has indeed served a cause; Mr. Southey has betrayed one. Mr. Canning threw contempt on the cause of liberty by his wit; Mr. Southey has done it by his want of principle. "This, this is the unkindest blow of all." We should not mind any thing but that;—that is the reflection that stabs us : "That the law By which mankind now suffers, is most just. For by superior energies; more strict In their unhallow'd principles; the bad Mr. Coleridge thinks that this triumph over himself and the Poet-laureate is a triumph to us. God forbid! It shews that he knows as little about us as he does about himself. This question of apostacy may be summed up in a very few words :-First, if Mr. Southey is not an apostate, we should like to know who ever was? Secondly, whether the term, apostate, is a term of reproach? If it has ceased to be so, it is another among the triumphs of the present king's reign, and a greater proof than any brought forward in the Quarterly Review, of the progress of public spirit and political independence among us of late years! A man may change his opinion. Good. But if he changes his opinion as his interest or vanity would prompt, if he deserts the weak to go to the stronger side, the change is a suspicious one; and we shall have a right to impute it rather to a defect of moral |