Be here the darkness left; meet thou th' GIVE her the wreckage of strife

From Macmillan's Magazine.
ROBERT SOUTHEY.

NEARLY seventy years ago Macaulay

priella" and "Omniana," with all the rest, have to be sought in catalogues and got together, not indeed with im

expressed a doubt whether Southey's mense research (for none of them is

exactly rare), but with some trouble and delay. In any other country a deceut if not a splendid complete edition would long ago have enshrined and

style always, frequently so excellent in mere substance, so constantly enlivened with flashes of agreeable humor or hardly less agreeable prejudice, and above all informed by such an astonishing knowledge of books. Johnson may have been fitted to grapple with whole libraries; but Southey did grapple with them, his industry being as notoriously untiring as the great lexicographer's was notoriously intermittent.

poems would be read in half a century, but was certain that, if read, they would be admired. The doubt has certainly been justified; the certainty may seem more than a little doubtful. kept on view work so admirable in Southey's character, which was once subjected to the most unjust, though not perhaps the most unintelligible, obloquy, has long been cleared; and those who most dislike his matured views in political and ecclesiastical matters are the first to admit that few English men of letters have a more stainless record. His prose style, the merits of which were indeed never denied by any competent judges, has won more and more praise from such judges as time went on. But he is less read Even in the article of biography the than ever as a whole, and his poems same malign, and to some slight deare the least read part of him. These gree mysterious, fate has pursued him. poems, which the best critics of his His life was extremely uneventful; own generation admired; on which he but, except for the great catastrophe of himself counted, not in boastfulness or Sir Walter's speculative career, it was in pique, but with a serene and quiet not much more uneventful than Scott's. confidence, to make him as much ex- He was a delightful, though a somealted by the next age as he thought what too copious letter-writer; he himself unduly neglected by his own; knew at all times of his life some of which extorted a grudging tribute even the most interesting people of the day; from the prejudice of Byron, — now and scanty as were his means he was a find hardly any readers, and fewer hospitable host and an untiring ciceeven to praise than to read. Even rone in a country flooded every year among the few who have read them, with tourists. But he was as unlucky and who can discern their merits, es- in his biographers as Scott and Byron teem rather than enthusiasm is the were lucky. Cuthbert Southey appears common note; and esteem is about the to have been an excellent person of most fatal sentiment that can be ac- good taste and fair judgment, but poscorded to poetry. sessed of no great literary skill in genIt is of the prose rather than of the eral, and of no biographical genius in verse that Macaulay's prognostication particular; while he had the additional has been thoroughly fulfilled. "The disadvantage of being the youngest Life of Nelson" represents it a little child, born too late to know much of less forlornly, but with hardly less in- his father, or of his father's affairs justice than “The Battle of Blenheim" during earlier years. Dr. Warter, and one or two other things represent Southey's son-in-law, had more literary the verse in the public memory. The ambition than Cuthbert; but he was stately quartos of "The History of deficient in judgment and in the indisBrazil" and "The Peninsular War," pensable power of selecting from the the decent octavos of "The Colloquies letters of a man who seems often to on the Progress and Prospects of Soci- have written much the same things to ety" and "The Book of the Church," three or four correspondents on the the handy little doudecimos of "Es-same day. The result is that though

"The Life and Correspondence" is a heirs of Lord Somerville. Southey, charming book as a book, with portraits however, never benefited by either, for and frontispieces showing the dead and his uncle's fortune went out of the delightful art of line-engraving at its family altogether, and it turned out best, and though both it and "The that Lord Somerville had somehow Selected Letters" are full of interest, got the entail barred. His father, too, that interest is, in the ten volumes and failed and died early, and all the famperhaps five thousand pages of the ily assistance that he ever had came two, so frittered and duplicated, watered from the side of his mother, Margaret down and wasted, that only patient and Hill, who was pretty well connected. skilled extractors can get at it. An Her half-sister, Miss Tyler, extended a abridgment, putting the life together in capricious and tyrannical protection to Southey's own words, has, I believe, the boy in his extreme youth (turning been executed, and by no incompetent him out of doors later on the score of hand; but there is always a curse on Pantisocracy and Miss Fricker), while abridgments. And besides, the charm her brother, Mr. Hill, a clergyman, of a biography consists hardly more in was Southey's Providence till long after the actual autobiographic matter, found he reached manhood. After a childin letters or otherwise, than in the hood (unimportant though interesting connecting framework. It is because to read about) in which he very early Boswell and Lockhart knew how to developed a passion for English literaexecute this framework in such a mas-ture, he was sent by his uncle to Westterly fashion that their books possess minster in the spring of 1788, and an immortality which even the conver- remained there with not much intersations of Johnson, even the letters of mission till it was time for him to go to Scott could not have fully achieved by Oxford. themselves.

Southey, for whose early years there is practically no source of information but an autobiographic fragment written rather late in life, and dwelling on detail with interesting though rather disproportionate fulness, was born in Wine Street, Bristol, on the 12th of August, 1774. His birthday gave him, according to an astrological friend, “a gloomy capability of walking through desolation," but does not seem to have carried with it any sporting tendencies. At least his only recorded exploit in that way is the eccentric, and one would think slightly hazardous, one of shooting wasps with a horse-pistol loaded with sand. His father, also a Robert, was only a linendraper, but the Southeys, though, as their omnilegent representative confesses, "so obscure that he never found the name in any book," were Somerset folk of old date and entitled to bear arms. They had, moreover, actual wealth in the possession of one of their members, the poet's uncle John Cannon Southey, and expectations in the shape of estates entailed upon them in default of the male

This latter translation, however, was not effected without alarums and excursions. Although Southey, neither as boy nor yet as man, was the kind of person thoroughly to enjoy or thoroughly profit by a public school, he was on the whole loyal to his own, and it produced a valuable and durable impression on him. The coarser and more hackneyed advantage of “making friends" he had to the uttermost; for it was there that he made the acquaintance of Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, who was through life his patron as well as his friend, and of Grosvenor Bedford, his constant correspondent and intellectual double. He also profited as much as need be in the matter of education, though, as has happened with other boys who have gone to school with more general information than solid instruction, he was promoted rather too rapidly to become a thorough scholar in the strict sense. Nor did some rough experiences in his early days do him much if any harm. But the end of his stage was in a way unfortunate. Nothing could have less resembled the real man than his ene

" walk

mies' representation of him as a supple | resenting even the shocking innovation and servile instrument, keen to note of his wearing his hair uncropped and and obstinate to seize the side on which unpowdered in hall. His tutor, with his bread was buttered, and born to be perhaps more frankness than sense of a frequenter of Mainchance Villa. As duty, said to him, "Mr. Southey, sir, a matter of fact he was always an un- you won't learn anything by my leccompromising and impracticable ideal- tures; so if you have any studies of ist, though with some safeguards to be your own, you had better pursue noticed presently. In his last days at them." This he did by getting up at school he showed this quality just as five o'clock in the morning to breakhe did twenty or forty years later, fast (one shudders to hear) on "bread when he constantly struggled to write and cheese and red wine negus in the Quarterly Review as if he were ing all over the country, learning to sole proprietor, sole editor, and sole swim and to row, and associating contributor thereof. It is needless to chiefly with men of his old school. He say that in his time, as earlier and seems to have kept terms or not with a later, any Westminster boy of ability casualty somewhat surprising even in rather above the average, and of toler- that age of lax discipline and few or no able character and conduct, had his examinations; and after about a year future made plain by the way of Christ and a half of this sort of thing he Church or Trinity as the case might ceased to reside at all. It is scarcely be. But Southey must needs start a surprising that he should have felt periodical called the Flagellant, whereof very little affection for a place where the very title was in the circumstances he stayed so little and sat so loose; seditious, and in an early number made | and long afterwards he notes that, a direct attack on corporal punishment. though he was constantly dreaming of This arousing the authorities, he con- Westminster, he never dreamed of fessed and expressed contrition; but Oxford. the head master, Dr. Vincent, was im- In fact he was busy with thoughts placable, and not only insisted on his and schemes quite alien from the exleaving the school, but directly or in-isting scheme, or indeed from any posdirectly caused Dean Cyril Jackson to sible scheme, of the university. He refuse to receive him even as a com- had made the acquaintance of Colemoner at Christ Church. He matricu-ridge; his boyish friendship with the lated at Balliol without demur in Miss Frickers had ripened into an enNovember, 1792, going into residence gagement with one of them, Edith; he in January. Perhaps, indeed, though his fortunes were now entering on a rather prolonged low tide, this particular il luck was, even from the lowest point of view, not such very bad luck after all. At Christ Church even as a commoner, much more as a junior student, under such a dean as Jackson, who bore the sword by no means in vain, a youngster of Southey's tone and temper, full of Jacobinism and all its attendant crazes, would have come probably, and rather sooner than later, to some signal mischance, even more decided and damaging to his prospects than the close of his Westminster career. At Balliol, though he was in no particularly good odor, they seem to have left him very much alone, not

had, though the atrocities of the Terror had much weakened his Gallomania, written "Joan of Arc," and he had plunged ardently into the famous schemes of "Pantisocracy” and “Aspheterism." Of these much has been heard, though I never could make out why, of these two characteristic specimens of Estesian language, Pantisocracy should have secured a place in the general memory which its companion has not. As Coleridge's many biographers have made known, Pantisocrasy, a scheme for a socialist colony in Pennsylvania or Wales or anywhere, broke down; and it pleased Coleridge to consider that the blame was mainly Southey's. As a matter of fact it was impossible to start it with

out money, of which most of the Pan- | orders, he should go to Lisbon (where tisocrats had none, and the others very Mr. Hill was chaplain) for six months little; and no doubt Southey, who, to "simmer down," and should then visionary as he still was, had some read law. Southey consented, but, common sense and a very keen sense resolving to make desertion of his beof what was due to others, saw that to trothed impossible, married Edith attempt it would be cruel and criminal. Fricker on November 14th, 1795, and While Coleridge had been ecstatically parted from her at the church door. formulating his enthusiasm in such This marriage, and the Portuguese sentences as "America! Southey! journey which immediately succeeded, Miss Fricker! Pantisocracy!"his may be said to have finally settled more practical friend was inquiring of Southey's fortunes in life, young as he Mr. Midshipman Thomas Southey, his brother, "What do your common blue trousers cost?" Alas! when a man combines even an enthusiastic love for Aspheterism with a sense of the cost of common blue trousers, the end cannot be doubtful.

On

was at the time. He was never the man to shirk a responsibility, and though for some time to come he loyally attempted to read law, he soon made up his mind that it was never likely to give him a livelihood. the other hand his visit to the PeninIf, however, anybody imagined (and sula, with the interest thus created in indeed the manufacturers of "Mr. its history and languages, gave him Feathernest" did try to set up such a that central subject and occupation notion) that Southey relinquished his which is almost indispensable to a generous schemes of honest toil abroad working man of letters (such as he was for a life of pensioned and voluptuous marked out to be and soon became) if infamy at home, it was a very vain he is not to be a mere bookseller's imagination. For a time, in October, hack. Directly, indeed, Southey's 1794, and later, his prospects were Spanish and Portuguese books and about as little encouraging as those of studies were about the least remunerany young man in England. He had ative of all his mostly ill-paid work. steadfastly resolved not to take orders, The great "History of Portugal," the cardinal point of his benevolent planned almost at once, never saw the uncle's scheme for him; his aunt light at all; and "The History of Braturned him out of doors; his mother zil," its more manageable offshoot and had nothing to give him; and his in- episode, was but an unprofitable book. tended bride was penniless. His But this visit to Lisbon, and another of wants, however, were exceedingly mod- somewhat longer duration which he est, but fifty pounds a year. He de- took with his wife some years later, livered historical lectures at Bristol, were of immense service. They thorlectures of the beautiful sweeping sort oughly established his health, which ("from the Origin of Society to the had been anything but strong; they American War") which the intelligent gave him, as has been said, a central undergraduate delights in; and they subject to work upon in which he beseem to have been not unsuccessful. came an authority, and which served John Scott, the future victim of that as tie-beam and king-post both to his unlucky duel, undertook to find him multifarious work; and they furnished journalism at a guinea and a half a him with one of those invaluable stores week, though it is not clear that this of varied and pleasurable memory than ever came to anything. Cottle (Jo- which nothing is of more consequence seph of Bristol, the brother of Amos) to a man whose life is to be passed in gave him fifty guineas for "Joan of apparently monotonous study. Are" and as many copies of the book more than once planned a third visit, to get rid of by subscription. Lastly, but war, scanty finances, unceasing Mr. Hill, his unwearied uncle, sug- occupations, and other things prevented gested that, as he would not take it; and though in his later years he

He