principle than to an accession of intellectual strength. Again, no man, be he who he may, has a right to change his opinion, and to be violent on opposite sides of a question. For the only excuse for dogmatical intolerance is, that the person who holds an opinion is totally blinded by habit to all objections against it, so that he can see nothing wrong on his own side, and nothing right on the other; which cannot be the case with any person who has been sincere in the opposite opinion. No one, therefore, has a right to call another "the greatest of scoundrels" for holding the opinions which he himself once held, without first formally acknowledging that he himself was the greatest of hypocrites when he maintained those opinions. When Mr. Southey subscribes to these conditions, we will give him a license to rail on whom and as long as he pleases: but not-till then! Apostates are violent in their opinions, because they suspect their truth, even when they are most sincere: they are forward to vilify the motives of those who differ from them, because their own are more than suspected by the world! We proceed to notice the flabby defence of "the Wat Tyler," from the well-known pen of Mr. Coleridge, which, as far as we can understand it, proceeds upon the following assumptions :

1. That Mr. Southey was only 19 when he wrote it, and had forgotten, from that time to this, all the principles and sentiments contained in it.

Answer. A person who forgets all the sentiments and principles to which he was most attached at nineteen, can have no sentiments ever after worth being attached to. Further, it is not true that Mr. Southey gave up the general principles of Wat Tyler, which he wrote at nineteen, till almost as many years after. He did not give them up till many years after he had received his Irish pension in 1800. He did not give them up till with this leaning to something beyond "the slides of his magic lanthorn," and "the pleasing fervour of his imagination," he was canted out of them by the misty metaphysics of Mr. Coleridge, Mr. Southey being no conjurer in such matters, and Mr. Cole

ridge being a great quack. The dates of his works will shew this: as it was indeed excellently well shewn in The Morning Chronicle the other day. His Joan of Arc, his Sonnets and Inscriptions, his Letters from Spain and Portugal, his Annual Anthology, in which was published Mr. Coleridge's "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," are a series of invectives against Kings, Priests, and Nobles, in favour of the French Revolution, and against war and taxes, up to the year 1803. Why does he not get an injunction against all these? To set aside all Mr. Southey's jacobin publications, it would be necessary to erect a new court of Chancery. Mr. Coleridge's insinuation, that he had changed all his opinions the year after, when Mr. S. and Mr. C., in conjunction, wrote the Fall of Robespierre, is, therefore, not true. But Mr. Coleridge never troubles himself about facts or dates; he is only "watching the slides of his magic lanthorn," and indulging in "the pleasing fervour of poetical inspiration."

2. That Mr. Southey was a mere boy when he wrote Wat Tyler, and entertained Jacobin opinions: that being a child, he felt as a child, and thought slavery, superstition, war, famine, bloodshed, taxes, bribery and corruption, rotten boroughs, places and pensions, shocking things; but that now he is become a man, he has put away childish things, and thinks there is nothing so delightful as slavery, superstition, war, famine, bloodshed, taxes, bribery and corruption, rotten boroughs, places and pensions, and particularly, his own.

Answer. Yet Mr. Coleridge tells us that when he wrote Wat Tyler, he was a man of genius and learning. That Mr. Southey' was a wise man when he wrote this poem, we do not pretend: that he has ever been so, is more than we know. This we do know, and it is worth attending to; that all that Mr. Southey has done best in poetry, he did before he changed his political creed; that all that Mr. Coleridge ever did in poetry, as the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, the Three Graves, his Poems and his Tragedy, he had written when, according to his own account, he must have been a very ignorant, idle, thoughtless person; that

much the greater part of what Mr. Wordsworth has done best in poetry was done about the same period; and if what these persons have done in poetry, in indulging the "pleasing fervour of a lively imagination," gives no weight to their political opinions at the time they did it, what they have done since in science or philosophy to establish their authority, is more than we know. All the authority that they have as poets and men of genius must be thrown into the scale of Revolution and Reform. Their Jacobin principles indeed gave rise to their Jacobin poetry. Since they gave up the first, their poetical powers have flagged, and been comparatively or wholly" in a state of suspended animation.” Their genius, their style, their versification, every thing down to their spelling, was revolutionary. Their poetical innovations unhappily did not answer any more than the French Revolution. As their ambition was baulked in this first favourite direction, it was necessary for these restless persons to do something to get into notice; as they could not change their style, they changed their principles; and instead of writing popular poetry, fell to scribbling venal prose.-Mr. Southey's opinion, like Mr. Wordsworth's or Mr. Coleridge's, is of no value, except as it is his own, the unbiassed, undepraved dictate of his own understanding and feelings; not as it is a wretched, canting, reluctant echo of the opinion of the world. Poet-laureates are courtiers by profession; but we say that poets are naturally Jacobins. All the poets of the present day have been so, with a single exception, which it would be invidious to mention. If they have not all continued so, this only shews the instability of their own characters, and that their natural generosity and romantic enthusiasm, "their lofty, imaginative, and innocent spirits," have not been proof against the incessant, unwearied importunities of vulgar ambition. The poets, we say then, are with us, while they are worth keeping. We take the sound part of their heads and hearts, and make Mr. Croker and the Courier a present of the rest. What the philosophers are, let the dreaded name of modern philosophy

answer!

3. Mr. Coleridge compares us to the long-eared virtuoso, the ass, that found Apollo's lute," left behind by him when he ascended to his own natural place, to sit thenceforward with all the Muses around him, instead of the ragged cattle of Admetus.”

Answer. Now it seems that Mr. Coleridge and other common friends of his, such as the author of the Fall of Robespierre and of Democratic Lectures, or Lectures on Democracy, in the year 1794, knew a good deal of Mr. Southey before he dropped this lute. Were they the ragged cattle of Admetus that Mr. Southey was fain to associate with during his obscure metamorphosis and strange Jacobin disguise? Did the Coleridges, the Wordsworths, the Lloyds and Lambs and Co. precede the Hunts, the Hazlitts, and the Cobbetts, in listening to Mr. Southey. tuning his mystic harp to praise Lepaux," the Parisian Theophilanthropist? And is it only since Mr. Southey has sat "quiring to the young-eyed cherubim," with the Barrymores, the Crokers, the Giffords, and the Stroehlings, that his natural genius and moral purity of sentiment have found their proper level and reward? Be this as it may, we plead guilty to the charge of some little indiscreet admiration of the Apollo of Jacobinism. We did not however find his lute three and twenty years after he had dropped it "in a thistle." We saw it in his hands. We heard him with our own ears play upon it, loud and long; and we can swear he was as well satisfied with his own music as we could be. "Asinos asinina decent,"-a bad compliment, in the style of Dogberry, which Mr. C. pays to his friend and to himself, as one of his early ragged auditors. Now whether Mr. Southey has since that period ascended to heaven or descended to the earth, we shall leave it to Mr. Coleridge himself to decide. For he says, that at the time when the present poet-laureate wrote Wat Tyler, he (Mr. Southey) was " a young man full of glorious visions concerning the possibilities of human nature, because his lofty, imaginative, and innocent spirit, had mistaken its own virtues and powers for the average character of mankind.”

Since Mr. Southey went to court, he has changed his tone. Asinos asinina decent. Is that Mr. Coleridge's political logic? *

4. That Mr. Southey did not express his real opinions, even at that time, in Wat Tyler, which is a dramatic poem, in which mob-orators and rioters figure, with appropriate sentiments, as Jack Cade may do in Shakespear.

Answer. This allusion to the dramatic characters of Shakespear is certainly unfortunate, and Mr. Coleridge himself hiuts as much. Rioters and mob-preachers are not the only persons who appear in "the Wat Tyler." The King and the Archbishop come forward in their own persons, according to Mr. Coleridge, with appropriate sentiments, labelled and put into their mouths. For example:

Philpot. Every moment brings

Fresh tidings of our peril.

King. It were well

To yield them what they ask.

Archbishop, Aye, that my liege

Were politic. Go boldly forth to meet them,
Grant all they ask-however wild and ruinous ;-
Meantime, the troops you have already summoned
Will gather round them. Then my Christian power
Absolves you of your promise.

Walworth. Were but their ringleaders cut off, the rabble
Would soon disperse.

* Of the three persons that Mr. Coleridge, by a most preposterous anachronism, has selected to compose his asinine auditorý, Mr. Hunt was at the time in question a boy at school, not a stripling bard of nineteen or nine and twenty, but a real school-boy" declaiming on the patriotism of Brutus." As to Mr. Cobbett, he would at that time, had they come in his way, with one kick of his hard hoofs, have made a terrible crash among 66 " of the green corn Mr. Southey's Jacobin Pan's-pipe, and gone near to knock out the musician's brains into the bargain. The second person in this absurd trinity, who certainly thinks it "a robbery to be made equal to the other two," was the only hearer present at the rehearsal of Mr. Southey's overtures to Liberty and Equality, and to that "long-continued asinine bravura," which rings in Mr. Coleridge's ears, but which certainly was not unaccompanied, for he himself was present ;

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