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

Price 2s.

1817.

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 prosePegasus darted upon the titles of the noble duke like a thunderbolt, 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 other-Madam. 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 self-complacency 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 " swan-like end," in a compliment to his opponents, he is sanguine

a

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 triumphantsleek, 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 per

son-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 bis 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 self-sufficiency 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. Sou

they's consistency and moderation. All this is strange, but not We have said it all before. Why does Mr. repeat the accusation, by furnishing us with

new to our readers. Southey oblige us to 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 thumbscrews 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" threeand-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 governmentparty, 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 of the views of the Friends of Reform in parliament. Nay, Mr. Southey requoted Mr. Canning's quotation, for the purpose of reviling all Reform and all Reformers, in the "Quarterly Review;"-a place in which any one so reviled can no more defend himself than Mr. Southey can defend himself in parliament; and which it seems affords equal" protection" to those who avail themselves of it; for a Quarterly Reviewer, according to Mr. Southey, being anonymous, is not at all accountable for what he writes. He says,

"As to the "Quarterly Review," you can have no other authority for ascribing any particular paper in that journal to one person or to another, than common report. The "Quarterly Review". stands upon its own merits." [Yet it was for what Mr. Southey wrote in that Review, that The Courier told us at the time that