remedy, may continue, it is impossible to say. A want of keeping is the distinguishing quality of the French character. A people of this sort cannot be depended on for a moment. They are blown about like a weather-cock, with every breath of caprice or accident, and would cry vive l'empereur to-morrow, with as much vivacity and as little feeling, as they do vive le roi to-day. They have no fixed principle of action. They are alike indifferent to every thing: their self-complacency supplies the place of all other advantages-of virtue, liberty, honour, and even of outward appearances. They are the only people who are vain of being cuckolded and being conquered. A people who, after trampling over the face of Europe so long, fell down before their assailants without striking a blow, and who boast of their submission as a fine thing, are not a nation of men, but of women. The spirit of liberty, at the Revolution, gave them an impulse common to humanity; the genius of Bonaparte gave them the spirit of military ambition. Both of these gave an energy and consistency to their character, by concentrating their natural volatility on one great object. But when both of these causes failed, the Allies found that France consisted of nothing but ladies' toilettes. The army are the muscular part of the state; mere patriotism is a pasteboard visor, which opposes no resistance to the sword. Whatever they determine will be done; an effeminate public is a nonentity. They will not relish the Bourbons long, if they remain at peace; and if they go to war, they will want a monarch who is also a general.

THE LAY OF THE LAUREATE, CARMEN NUPTIALE, by Robert Southey, Esq., Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal Spanish Academy of History.-London, Longmans, 1816. Examiner, July 7, 1816.

THE dog which his friend Launce brought as a present to Madam Silvia in lieu of a lap-dog, was something like The Lay of the Laureate,' which Mr. Southey has here offered to the Princess Charlotte for a Nuptial Song. It is a very currish performance, and deserves none but currish thanks.' Launce thought his own dog, Crab, better than any other; and Mr. Southey thinks his own praises the fittest compliment for a lady's ear. His Lay is ten times as long, and he thinks it is therefore ten times better than an Ode of Mr. Pye's.

Mr. Southey in this poem takes a tone which was never heard

before in a drawing-room. It is the first time that ever a Reformist was made a Poet-laureate. Mr. Croker was wrong in introducing his old friend, the author of Joan of Arc,' at CarltonHouse. He might have known how it would be. If we had doubted the good old adage before, Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin,' since reading 'The Lay of the Laureate,' we are sure of it. A Jacobin is one who would have his single opinion govern the world, and overturn every thing in it. Such a one is Mr. Southey. Whether he is a Republican or a Royalist,-whether he hurls up the red cap of liberty, or wears the lily, stained with the blood of all his old acquaintance, at his breast,-whether he glories in Robespierre or the Duke of Wellington-whether he pays a visit to Old Śarum, or makes a pilgrimage to Waterloo,-whether he is praised by The Courier, or parodied by Mr. Canning,—whether he thinks a King the best or the worst man in his dominions,—whether he is a Theophilanthropist or a Methodist of the church of England,— whether he is a friend of Universal Suffrage and Catholic Emancipation, or a Quarterly Reviewer,-whether he insists on an equal division of lands, or of knowledge,-whether he is for converting infidels to Christianity, or Christians to infidelity,-whether he is for pulling down the kings of the East or those of the West,-whether he sharply sets his face against all establishments, or maintains that whatever is, is right,-whether he prefers what is old to what is new, or what is new to what is old,-whether he believes that all human evil is remediable by human means, or makes it out to himself that a Reformer is worse than a house-breaker,-whether he is in the right or the wrong, poet or prose-writer, courtier or patriot,-he is still the same pragmatical person-every sentiment or feeling that he has is nothing but the effervescence of incorrigible overweening self-opinion. He not only thinks whatever opinion he may hold for the time infallible, but that no other is even to be tolerated, and that none but knaves and fools can differ with him. The friendship of the good and wise is his.' If any one is so unfortunate as to hold the same opinions that he himself formerly did, this but aggravates the offence by irritating the jealousy of his self-love, and he vents upon them a double portion of his spleen. Such is the constitutional slenderness of his understanding, its glassy essence,' that the slightest collision of sentiment gives an irrecoverable shock to him. He regards a Catholic or a Presbyterian, a Deist or an Atheist, with equal repugnance, and makes no difference between the Pope, the Turk, and the Devil. He thinks a rival poet a bad man, and would suspect the principles, moral, political, and religious, of any one who did not spell the

word laureate with an e at the end of it. If Mr. Southey were a bigot, it would be well; but he has only the intolerance of bigotry. His violence is not the effect of attachment to any principles, prejudices, or paradoxes of his own, but of antipathy to those of others. It is an impatience of contradiction, an unwillingness to share his opinions with others, a captious monopoly of wisdom, candour, and common sense. He is not an enthusiast in religion, but he is an enemy to philosophers; he does not respect old establishments, but he hates new ones; he has no objection to regicides, but he is inexorable against usurpers; he will tell you that 'the re-risen cause of evil' in France yielded to the Red Cross and Britain's arm of might,' and shortly after he denounces this Red Cross as the scarlet whore of Babylon, and warns Britain against her eternal malice and poisoned cup; he calls on the Princess Charlotte in the name of the souls of ten thousand little children, who are without knowledge in this age of light, SAVE OR WE PERISH,' and yet sooner than they should be saved by Joseph Fox or Joseph Lancaster, he would see them damned; he would go himself into Egypt and pull down the barbarous kings' of the East, and yet his having gone there on this very errand is not among the least of Bonaparte's crimes; he would abate the malice' of the Pope and the Inquisition, and yet he cannot contain the fulness of his satisfaction at the fall of the only person who had both the will and the power to do this. Mr. Southey began with a decent hatred of kings and priests, but it yielded to his greater hatred of the man who trampled them in the dust. He does not feel much affection to those who are born to thrones, but that any one should gain a throne as he has gained the laureate-wreath, by superior merit alone, was the unpardonable sin against Mr. Southey's levelling Muse!

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The poetry of the Lay is beneath criticism; it has all sorts of obvious common-place defects, without any beauties either obvious or recondite. It is the Namby-Pamby of the Tabernacle; a Methodist sermon turned into doggrel verse. It is a gossipping confession of Mr. Southey's political faith-the Practice of Piety' or the Whole Duty of Man' mixed up with the discordant slang of the metaphysical poets of the nineteenth century. Not only do his sentiments every where betray the old Jacobinical leaven, the same unimpaired desperate unprincipled spirit of partisanship, regardless of time, place, and circumstance, and of every thing but its own headstrong will; there is a gipsey jargon in the expression of his sentiments which is equally indecorous. Does our Laureate think it according to court-etiquette that he should be as old-fashioned in his language as in the cut of his clothes?-On the present occasion, when one might expect a truce

with impertinence, he addresses the Princess neither with the fancy of the poet, the courtier's grace, nor the manners of a gentleman, but with the air of an inquisitor or father-confessor. Geo. Fox, the Quaker, did not wag his tongue more saucily against the Lord's Anointed in the person of Charles 11., than our Laureate here assures the daughter of his Prince, that so shall she prosper in this world and the next, as she minds what he says to her. Would it be believed (yet so it is) that, in the excess of his unauthorized zeal, Mr. Southey in one place advises the Princess conditionally to rebel against her father? Here is the passage. The Angel of the English church thus addresses the Royal Bride:—

'Bear thou that great Eliza in thy mind,
Who from a wreck this fabric edified;
And HER who to a nation's voice resigned,
When Rome in hope its wiliest engines plied,
By her own heart and righteous Heaven approved,
Stood up against the Father whom she loved."

This is going a good way. Is it meant, that if the Prince Regent, 'to a nation's voice resigned,' should grant Catholic Emancipation in defiance of the Quarterly Review,' Mr. Southey would encourage the Princess in standing up against her father, in imitation of the pious and patriotic daughter of James 11.?

This quaint effusion of poetical fanaticism is divided into four parts, the Proem, the Dream, the Epilogue, and L'Envoy. The Proem opens thus :

There was a time when all my youthful thought
Was of the Muse; and of the Poet's fame,
How fair it flourisheth and fadeth not,

...

Alone enduring, when the Monarch's name
Is but an empty sound, the Conqueror's bust
Moulders and is forgotten in the dust.'

This may be very true, but not so proper to be spoken in this place. Mr. Southey may think himself a greater man than the Prince Regent, but he need not go to Carlton-House to tell him so. He endeavours to prove that the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington (put together) are greater than Bonaparte, but then he is by his own rule greater than all three of them. We have here perhaps the true secret of Mr. Southey's excessive anger at the late Usurper. If all his youthful thought was of his own inborn superiority to conquerors or kings, we can conceive that Bonaparte's fame must have appeared a very great injustice done to his pretensions; it is not impossible that the uneasiness with which he formerly heard the names of Marengo, of Austerlitz, of Jena, of Wagram, of Friedland, and of

Borodino, may account for the industrious self-complacency with which he harps upon those of Busaco, Vimiera, Salamanca, Vittoria, Thoulouse, and Waterloo; and that the Iron Crown of Italy must have pressed upon his (Mr. Southey's) brows, with a weight most happily relieved by the light laureate-wreath! We are justified in supposing Mr. Southey capable of envying others, for he supposes others capable of envying him. Thus he sings of himself and his office :

"Yea in this now, while malice frets her hour,
Is foretaste given me of that meed divine;
Here undisturbed in this sequestered bower,
The friendship of the good and wise is mine;

And that green wreath which decks the Bard when dead,
That laureate garland crowns my living head.

That wreath which in Eliza's golden days

My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore,

That which rewarded Drayton's learned lays,

Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel 1 bore...
Grin, Envy, through thy ragged mask of scorn!

In honour it was given, with honour it is worn!'

Now we do assure Mr. Southey, that we do not envy him this honour. Many people laugh at him, some may blush for him, but nobody envies him. As to Spenser, whom he puts in the list of great men who have preceded him in his office, his laureateship has been bestowed on him by Mr. Southey; it did not crown his living head.' We all remember his being refused the hundred pounds for his Fairy Queen.' Poets were not wanted in those days to celebrate the triumphs of princes over the people. But why does he not bring his list down nearer to his own time-to Pye and Whitehead and Colley Cibber? Does Mr. Southey disdain to be considered as the successor even of Dryden? That green wreath which decks our author's living head, is so far from being, as he would insinuate, an anticipation of immortality, that it is no credit to any body, and least of all to Mr. Southey. He might well have declined the reward of exertions in a cause which throws a stigma of folly or something worse on the best part of his life. Mr. Southey ought not to have received what would not have been offered to the author of Joan of Arc.'

Mr. Southey himself maintains that his song has still been to Truth and Freedom true'; that he has never changed his opinions; that it is the cause of French liberty that has left him, not he the cause. That may be so. But there is one person in the kingdom who has, we take it, been at least as consistent in his conduct 1 The ignorant will suppose that these are two proper names.

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