longer sway the opinions of a majority of them. We are the posterity to which they appealed; and the justice now rendered to them is an assurance of equal justice to be meted out to those of our own generation. Then, a clique or a party at court, or at most a party in the metropolis, could settle for a time the rival claims both of poets and philosophers; for books were sealed mysteries to the bulk of the people. Now, the multitude form the tribunal; and as various prejudices and collateral influences offset and balance each other, just as discords are lost in a choir of thousands of voices singing in unison, the collected verdict, the resultant of many forces, is the judgment of truth and nature. Let him who hopes for an immortality of fame bow to their deci

sion.

If Southey had been a discoverer of scientific or philosophical truth, he might justly have withstood the reigning taste that condemned his books, and called it ignorance or a caprice of fashion, which the saner feelings or clearer perceptions of a later age would set aside. But he was a poet, whose object it was to please, whose success consisted in pleasing; he addressed a world-wide audience; and if he did not move numbers, this very fact proved that the chords of the human heart were not responsive to his poetic touch. We have no doubt that the judgment of posterity upon the relative merits of his poetical works will be found to have been correctly indicated by their comparative rapidity of sale at the time of publication. One or two editions of Thalaba and Roderic were bought up by the public with reasonable speed; Kehama passed off more slowly, and Madoc only lumbered the bookseller's shelves. His ballads and eclogues, serious and comic, the hasty productions of his youth, were almost popular; some of them will outlive his epics by centuries, for they have already become household words.

Southey misjudged his own talents and the proper direction of them, because he led the life of a literary recluse, seldom leaving his quiet home by the Lakes to mingle with the world, and to have his opinions formed by attrition with those of the multitude. His notions could not be changed by argument, but he was very impressible by the magnetism of familiar intercourse. Whatever was nearest to him touched his heart too fondly to allow free scope for the action of his intellect.

At his own fireside, he was surrounded by a circle of women and children, to whom he was a most attached and indulgent parent, guide, playmate, and friend. They nursed his poetical vagaries by a constant tribute of affectionate praise. His love magnified the value of their judgments, while he could not conceive respect for the opinions of people whom he had

never seen.

If

Intercourse with men is almost as necessary as familiarity with books, for the formation of a sound literary taste. Southey had lived in the metropolis, or at Edinburgh, he would not so far have mistaken his vocation in literature. He was not a great thinker, not a great poet, not a great historian; but he was, for his time, the greatest writer of English prose. His style is a perfect model of purity, transparency, and vigor, with just enough of ornament to make the reader's path a pleasant one, and with marvellous aptness and propriety of diction. The rhythm of his sentences is faultless, never lapsing into a Johnsonian stateliness and monotony of phrase, and never weakened by too frequent recurrence of studied musical cadences. The thought was sometimes languid and the reasoning feeble; but the expression never. His manner, consequently, was best adapted to narration; he was a capital story-teller, and the best of biographers. His Life of Nelson, which was a mere expansion, executed in a few weeks, of an article in the Quarterly Review, will last as long as the English language, and will perpetuate the fame of its hero more surely than his victories at the Nile and Trafalgar. The Life of Wesley is an unpromising subject, and is overlaid with theological extracts, designed only to illustrate the progress and extravagance of fanaticism; but one may skim the book, omitting all the matter which is not from Southey's own pen, and he will find it a delightful biography. There is a love tale in the second and third volumes of The Doctor, which, though it has little incident and no pretension, merely from the charm of the diction and the exquisite sentiment that pervades it, is one of the most fascinating passages in English fiction. Yet we cannot wish that he had become a writer of romance. He had not the boundless wealth of invention, which heaped the pictured pages of Scott with a gorgeous profusion of scenes, characters, and incidents, such as never visited the imagination of

any other poet except Shakspeare. But Southey might have enriched our literature with a series of tales, combining the peculiarities of Mackenzie and Sterne, and far excelling both in simplicity, purity of feeling, and depth of pathos. He mistook his calling when he wrote so many epics and histories, and even when he speculated on the condition and prospects of society.

It is a great pity that the Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey undertook to write the life and edit the correspondence of his father. The biography is coldly written, what there is of it; for the fragments of narrative hardly fill up the numerous gaps that remain when we endeavor to piece out from the letters a connected view of the man's whole life and character. And even the collection of letters is imperfect; but few and brief extracts are given from those which were printed in the life of William Taylor, though the copyright of the latter book could not have prevented the editor of these volumes from reprinting them at length, as the ownership of letters must descend to the heirs of the writer of them. There were other letters of Southey already in print, particularly those contained in Cottle's Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey, which we should have been glad to see again in their proper places in this work. Then the biographer is provokingly silent on those points of personal history, on which the curiosity of the public has been sufficiently excited and tantalized. Of what use was it to attempt to draw again the veil over the frailties of poor Coleridge, after Cottle and De Quincey had told so large a portion of the story? Further concealment or reserve is injustice to the memory of Southey, to whose honor it ought to be generally known, that at a time when he was as much a slave to the desk for his daily bread as was ever galley slave to his oar, Coleridge's deserted wife and children found a permanent and bountiful home beneath his roof. The wayward husband and father could then squander in voluptuous self-indulgence the bounty of his other friends without feeling any check from his violated domestic ties. Southey seems to have been almost the only friend who ventured to hold to him the language of truth and soberness in reproof of his reckless career.

It was strange that Southey should preserve the sunny, affectionate, and sanguine disposition that he manifested

throughout life, when there was so little in his first home that was likely to foster it. His early childhood was passed chiefly in the house of his mother's half-sister, Miss Tyler, who had been beautiful and praised for her understanding, but had become an eccentric and cross-tempered old maid. She made the boy's life miserable by her whims, by her capricious severity and indulgence, and did her best to stunt his intellect by a most injudicious choice of teachers and studies. She finally showed her affection for him, when he had nearly come of age, by literally turning him out of doors late in a stormy night, and refusing ever to see him again, because the young enthusiast had become involved in his wild scheme of Pantisocracy, and had contracted an imprudent marriage engagement. His cheerful and elastic temperament had borne the numberless outbreaks of her wayward humor in his childhood, and was not broken by this rude blow, though he had just before been compelled to leave college, and was now penniless and in love. He writes in riotous spirits to a younger brother immediately after this disaster, and continued to scribble verses, of which he had already a countless stock on hand. His Pantisocratic dream had no sooner faded away, than his brain was filled with other visions, equally baseless, of fortune and fame to be achieved by his poetry. Successive disappointments in this respect did not cause him to abandon hope; repeated calls upon his charity, when he was really too poor to support himself, did not weary his benevolence. One of his earliest successful publications was an edition of Chatterton's works, undertaken solely for the benefit of the poet's surviving sister. The following are extracts from letters written when his circumstances were more prosperous, though the year's income was still dependent upon the year's exertions, and was barely sufficient for his wants.

"Do you remember that twenty years ago a letter, directed for me at your house, was carried to a paper-hanger of my name in Bedford Street, and the man found me out, and put his card into my hand? Upon the strength of this acquaintance, I have now a letter from this poor namesake, soliciting charity, and describing himself and his family as in the very depths of human misery. This is not the only proof I have had of a strange opinion that I am overflowing with riches. Poor wretched man,

what can I do for him! However, I do not like to shut my ears and my heart to a tale of this kind. Send him, I pray you, a two-pound note in my name, to No. 10 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth; your servant had better take it, for fear he should have been sent to the work-house before this time. When I come to town, I will seek about if any thing can be done for him." p. 347.

"I must trespass on you further, and request that you will seal up ten pounds, and leave it with Rickman, directed for Charles Lamb, Esq., from R. S. It is for poor John Morgan, whom you may remember some twenty years ago. This poor fellow, whom I knew at school, and whose mother has sometimes asked me to her table when I should otherwise have gone without a dinner, was left with a fair fortune, from £10,000 to £15,000, and without any vice or extravagance of his own he has lost the whole of it. A stroke of the palsy has utterly disabled him from doing any thing to maintain himself; his wife, a good-natured, kind-hearted woman, whom I knew in her bloom, beauty, and prosperity, has accepted a situation as mistress of a charity-school, with a miserable salary of £40 a year, and this is all they have. In this pitiable case, Lamb and I have promised him ten pounds a year each as long as he lives. I have got five pounds a year for him from an excellent fellow, whom you do not know, and who chooses on this occasion to be called A. B., and I have written to his Bristol friends, who are able to do more for him than we are, and on whom he has stronger personal claims, so that I hope we shall secure him the decencies of life. You will understand that this is an explanation to you, not an application. In a case of this kind, contributions become a matter of feeling and duty among those who know the party, but strangers are not, to be looked to." p. 378.

Perhaps from the very fact that Southey found so few to love in his early home, his affections entwined themselves. more readily about those with whom he was afterwards thrown in contact. "I have a trick," he writes, "of thinking too well of those I love-better than they generally deserve, and better than my cold and containing manners ever let them know. The foibles of a friend always endear him, if they have coëxisted with my knowledge of him." Two of his school fellows, Mr. Bedford and Mr. Wynn, were his active friends through life; and though they met but seldom after they left school, they continued for forty years a frequent interchange of letters written with the frank affec