'And we are strongly persuaded that the indignation which, in his early perusal of our history, the outrage on Wat Tyler's Daughter had kindled within him, was the circumstance that recommended the story to his choice for the first powerful exercise of his dramatic powers. It is this, too, we doubt not, that coloured and shaped his feelings during the whole composition of the drama.

Through the allegiance and just fealty

Which he did owe unto all womankind."

Mr. Coleridge might as well tell us that the Laureate wrote Wat Tyler as an Epithalamium on his own marriage. There is but one line on the subject from the beginning to the end. No; it is not Mr. Southey's way to say nothing on the subject on which he writes. If this were the main drift and secret spring of the poem, why does Mr. Southey wish to retract it now? Has he been taught by his present fashionable associates to laugh at Edmund Spenser, the darling of the boy Southey, to abjure his allegiance and just fealty to all womankind,' and to look upon rapes and ravishments' as 'exaggerated evils,' the product of an idle imagination, exciting a pleasurable fervour at the time, and signifying nothing afterwards? Is the outrage upon Wat Tyler's Daughter the only evil in history, or in the poem itself, which ought to inflame the virtuous indignation of the full-grown stripling bard? Are all the other oppressions recorded in the annals of the world nothing but horrible shadows, unreal mockeries,' that this alone should live within the book and volume of his brain unmixed with baser matter'? Or has Mr. Southey, the historian and the politician, at last discovered, that even this evil, the greatest and the only evil in the world, and not a mere illusion of his boyish imagination, is itself a bagatelle, compared with the blessings of the poll-tax, feudal vassalage, popery, and slavery, the attempt to put down which by murder, insurrection, and treason, in the reign of Richard 11. the poet-laureate once celebrated con amore in the Wat Tyler'?-In courtly malice and servility Mr. Southey has outdone Herodias's daughter. He marches into Chancery with his own head in a charger,' as an offering to Royal delicacy. He plucks out the heart of Liberty within him, and mangles his own breast to stifle every natural sentiment left there: and yet Mr. Coleridge would persuade us that this stuffed figure, this wretched phantom, is the living man. The finery of birth-day suits has dazzled his senses, so that he has no speculation in those eyes that he does glare with'; yet Mr. Coleridge would persuade us that this is the clear-sighted politician. Famine stares him in the face, and he looks upon her with lack-lustre eye. Despotism hovers over

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him, and he says, 'Come, let me clutch thee.' He drinks the cup of human misery, and thinks it is a cup of sack. He has no feeling left, but of tickling commodity'; no ears but for court whispers; no understanding but of his interest; no passion but his vanity. And yet they would persuade us that this non-entity is somebody—the chief dread of Jacobins and Jacobinism, or quacks and quackery.' If so, Jacobins and Jacobinism have not much to fear; and Mr. Coleridge may publish as many Lay Sermons as he pleases.

There is but one statement in the article in The Courier to which we can heartily assent; it is Mr. Southey's prediction of the fate of the French Revolution. The Temple of Despotism,' he said, 'would be rebuilt, like that of the Mexican God, with human skulls, and cemented with human blood.' He has lived to see this; to assist in the accomplishment of his prophecy, and to consecrate the spectre-building with pensioned hands!

A LETTER TO WILLIAM SMITH, Esq., M.P. from Robert Southey, Esq. John Murray, Albemarle-street. 1817. Price 25.

May 4, 1817.

THIS is very unlike Mr. Burke's celebrated Letter to the Duke of Bedford.' The last is the only work of the Irish orator and patriot, in which he was in earnest, and all that he wanted was sincerity. The attack made upon his pension, by rousing his self-love, kindled his imagination, and made him blaze out in a torrent of fiery eloquence, in the course of which his tilting prose-Pegasus darted upon the titles of the noble duke like a thunder-bolt, reversed his ancestral honours, overturned the monstrous straddle-legged figure of that legitimate monarch, Henry VIII., exploded the mines of the French revolution, kicked down the Abbé Sieyes's pigeon-holes full of constitutions, and only reposed from his whirling career, in that fine retrospect on himself, and the affecting episode to Admiral Keppel. Mr. Burke was an apostate, a malignant renegado,' like Mr. Southey; but there the comparison ends. He would not have been content, on such an occasion as the present, with Mistering his opponent, and Esquiring himself, like the ladies in the Beggar's Opera, who express the height of their rankling envy and dislike, by calling each otherMadam. Mr. Southey's self-love, when challenged to the lists, does not launch out into the wide field of wit or argument: it retires into its own littleness, collects all its slender resources in one poor effort of pert, pettifogging spite, makes up by studied malice for conscious

impotence, and attempts to mortify others by the angry sense of his own insignificance. He grows tenacious of his ridiculous pretensions, in proportion as they are given up by every body else. His selfcomplacency riots, with a peculiar and pointed gusto, in the universal contempt or compassion of friends and foes. In the last stage of a galloping consumption, while the last expiring puff of The Courier makes a swan-like end,' in a compliment to his opponents, he is sanguine of a deathless reputation-considers his soreness to the least touch as a proof of his being in a whole skin, and his uneasiness to repel every attack as a proof of his being invulnerable. In a word, he mistakes an excess of spleen and irritability for the consciousness of innocence, and sets up his own egotism, vanity, ill-humour, and intolerance, as an answer in full to all the objections which have been brought against him of vanity, egotism, malignity, and intolerance. His Letter' is a concentrated essence of a want of self-knowledge. It is the picture of the author's mind in little. In this respect, it is a psychological curiosity'; a study of human infirmity. As some persons bequeath their bodies to the surgeons to be dissected after their death, Mr. Southey publicly exposes his mind to be anatomized while he is living. He lays open his character to the scalping-knife, guides the philosophic hand in its painful researches, and on the bald crown of our petit tondu, in vain concealed under withered bay-leaves and a few contemptible grey hairs, you see the organ of vanity triumphant-sleek, smooth, round, perfect, polished, horned, and shining, as it were in a transparency. This is the handle of his intellect, the index of his mind; the guide, the anchor of his purest thoughts, and soul of all his moral being'; the clue to the labyrinth of all his tergiversations and contradictions; the medius terminus of his political logic.

-The ruling passion once express'd,

Wharton is plain, and Chartres stands confess'd.'

Once admit that Mr. Southey is always in the right, and every one else in the wrong, and all the rest follows. This at once reconciles Wat Tyler' and the Quarterly Review,' which Mr. William Smith took down to the House, in two different pockets for fear of a breach of the peace; identifies the poet of the Joan of Arc' and of the Annual Anthology' with the poet-laureate; and jumps the stripling into the man, whenever the latter has a mind to jump into a place or pension. Till you can deprive him of his personal identity, he will always be the same infallible person-in his own opinion. He is both judge and jury in his own cause; the sole standard of right and wrong. To differ with him is inexcusable; for 'there is

but one perfect, even himself.' He is the central point of all moral and intellectual excellence; the way, the truth, and the life. There is no salvation out of his pale; and yet he makes the terms of communion so strict, that there is no hope that way. The crime of Mr. William Smith and others, against whom this high-priest of impertinence levels his anathemas, is in not being Mr. Southey. What is right in him, is wrong in them; what is the height of folly or wickedness in them, is, as fortune and the flesh shall serve,' the height of wisdom and virtue in him; for there is no medium in his reprobation of others and approbation of himself. Whatever he does, is proper whatever he thinks, is true and profound: 'I, Robert Shallow, Esquire, have said it.' Whether Jacobin or Anti-jacobin, Theophilanthropist or Trinitarian, Spencean, or Ex-Spencean, the patron of Universal Suffrage or of close Boroughs, of the reversion of sinecure places, and pensions, or of the abolition of all property, -however extreme in one opinion or another, he alone is in the right; and those who do not think as he does, and change their opinions as he does, and go the lengths that he does, first on one side and then on the other, are necessarily knaves and fools. Wherever he sits, is the head of the table. Truth and justice are always at his side. The wise and virtuous are always with him. How should it be otherwise? He calls those wise and virtuous' who are of his way of thinking; the rest are sciolists, profligates, and coxcombs.' By a fiction of his own making, not by a fiction of the law, Mr. Southey can do no wrong; and to accuse him of it, is a libel on the face of it, and little short of high treason. It is not the poet-laureate, the author of Wat Tyler' and of the 'Quarterly Review,' who is to blame for his violence and apostacy; with that portion of selfsufficiency which this author possesses, these are most virtuous'; but it is the person who brings forward the contradictions and intemperance of these two performances who is never to be forgiven for questioning Mr. Southey's consistency and moderation. All this is strange, but not new to our readers. We have said it all before. Why does Mr. Southey oblige us to repeat the accusation, by furnishing us with fresh proofs of it? He is betrayed to his ruin by trusting to the dictates of his personal feelings and wounded pride; and yet he dare not look at his situation through any other medium. To know my deed, 't were best not know myself.' But does he expect all eyes as well as his to be blind with the pin and web'? Does he pull his laurel-crown as a splendid film over his eyes, and expect us to join in a game of political blindman's-buff with him, with a Hoop, do me no harm, good man'? Are we not to cry out while an impudent, hypocritical, malignant renegado is putting his gag in our

mouths, and getting his thumb-screws ready? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale,' says Sir Toby to the fantastical steward Malvolio? Does Mr. Southey think, because he is a pensioner, that he is to make us willing slaves? While he goes on writing in the Quarterly,' shall we give over writing in The Examiner? Before he puts down the liberty of the press, the press shall put him down, with all his hireling and changeling crew. In the servile war which Mr. Southey tells us is approaching, the service we have proposed to ourselves to do is, to neutralize the servile intellect of the country. This we have already done in part, and hope to make clear work of it, before we have done. -For example:

This heroic epistle to William Smith, Esq. from Robert Southey, sets off in the following manner :—

SIR,-You are represented in the newspapers as having entered, during an important discussion in parliament, into a comparison between certain passages in the Quarterly Review,' and the opinions which were held by the author of Wat Tyler' three-and-twenty years ago. It appears farther, according to the same authority, that the introduction of so strange a criticism, in so strange a place, did not arise from the debate, but was a premeditated thing; that you had prepared yourself for it, by stowing the Quarterly Review' in one pocket, and Wat Tyler in the other; and that you deliberately stood up for the purpose of reviling an individual who was not present to vindicate himself, and in a place which afforded you protection.' P. 2.

So that for Mr. William Smith in a debate on a bill for the suppression of all political opinions (as we are told by Mr. Alderman Smith, a very different person, to be sure, and according to Mr. Southey, no doubt, a highly respectable character, and a true lover of liberty and the constitution) for Mr. William Smith on such an occasion to introduce the sentiments of a well-known writer in a public journal, that writer being a whiffling tool of the court, and that journal the avowed organ of the government-party, in confirmation of his apprehensions of the objects and probable results of the bill then pending, was quite irrelevant and unparliamentary; nor had Mr. William Smith any right to set an additional stigma on the unprincipled and barefaced lengths which this writer now goes in servility and intolerance, by shewing the equal lengths to which he went formerly in popular fanaticism and licentiousness. Yet neither Mr. Southey nor his friend Mr. Wynne complained of Mr. Canning's want of regularity, or disrespect of the House, in lugging out of his pocket THE SPENCEAN PLAN as an argument against Reform, and as decisive