took a fair allowance of holidays, not unfrequently on the Continent, he never returned to Cintra and the Arrabida and those charmed territories of the "Roi de Garbe" to which he looked back as a sort of earthly Paradise, for all his consciousness that neither the things nor the people there were in all ways very good.

rival an appointment, which he soon gave up, as secretary to Mr. Corry, the Irish official, interrupted it. Various attempts were made by himself and his friends to get him something better, but without success, and his own preferments, until quite late in his life Sir Robert Peel supplemented them with a fresh pension, were a government annuity of £200 a year (much reduced by fees), which enabled him to relinquish Wynn's, and which was given him by the Whigs in 1808, and the laureateship in 1814 with its pay of rather less than £100 a year. Such were the ill gotten gains for which, according to the enemy, "Mr. Feathernest" sold his conscience.

Although Southey was but sevenand-twenty when he settled at Keswick, and though he lived for more than forty years longer, it is as unnecessary as it would be impracticable to follow his life during this later period as minutely as we have done hitherto. The ply was now taken, the vocation distinctly indicated, and the means and place of exercising it more or less secured. Thenceforward he lived in laborious peace, disturbed only by the loss in 1816 of his beloved son Herbert, about ten years after by that of his youngest daughter Isabel, and later by the mental illness and death of his wife. He never recovered this last shock; and though he married again, his second wife being the poetess Caroline Bowles, it was as a nurse rather than as a wife that Edith's successor accepted him, and he died himself, after some years of impaired intelligence, on March 21st, 1843.

Nor were many years to pass before he was established in the district with which his name is connected only less indissolubly than that of Wordsworth. He had indeed no special fancy for the lakes, nor for their climate after that of Portugal, and for some years at least had great difficulty in reconciling himself to them; but he hated London, where, when he at last gave up the bar, there was nothing particular to keep him; death and other chances weakened his ties to Bristol, and he had none elsewhere, while his fast-growing library made some permanent abode imperative. At last Coleridge, who had already settled himself at Keswick in a house too large for him, pressed the Southeys to join him there. Mrs. Southey naturally was glad to have the company of her sister, and they went, at first for a short time, but soon took root. Meanwhile the chief practical question had been settled first by the acceptance from his friend Wynn, a man of means, of an annuity of £160, and, secondly, by much miscellaneous newspaper work in the form of poems and reviews. "Thalaba," which had been finished in Portugal, where "The Curse of Kehema," under the name of "Keradon," was begun, brought him some fame, though his gains from this kind of work were always insignifi- An almost extravagantly Roman nose caut. But Southey, if he had expen- (the other Robert, Herrick, is the only sive tastes, did not indulge them; his Englishman I can think of who exwife was an excellent manager (too celled him in this respect) and an excellent indeed, as the sequel was extreme thinness did not prevent thought to show), and he contrived in Southey from being a very handsome some incomprehensible manner not man. His enemy Byron, who had only to keep out of debt, but to help no reason to be discontented with his own family liberally and strangers his own, declared that "to possess with no sparing hand. Southey's head and shoulders he would almost have written his 'Sapphics;'" and, despite his immense labors and his exceedingly bad habit of reading

The sojourn at Keswick began in 1801, and only ceased with Southey's life, though immediately after his ar

as he walked, he was till almost the imagined to be the principles of the last strong and active. The excellence French Revolution, he changed to a of his moral character has never been hearty detestation of its practice. His seriously contested by any one who liking for the Spaniards and his dislike knew; and the only blemish upon it of the French turned him from an appears to have been a slight touch of opponent of the war to a defender of Pharisaism, not indeed of the most it, and it was this more than anything detestable variety which exalts itself else that parted him from his old Whig above the publican, but of the still friends. In short, he was alwaystrying kind which is constantly in- guided by his sympathies; and as he clined to point out to the publican was never in his hottest days of Aswhat a publican he is, and what sad pheterism anything like a consistent things publicans are, and how he had and reasoned Radical, so in his most much better leave off being one. We rancorous days of reaction he never know even better than was known fifty was a consistent and reasoned Tory. years ago what were Coleridge's weak- Of his life, however, and his characnesses; yet it is impossible not to wish ter, and even of his opinious, interestthat Coleridge's brother-in-law had not ing as all three are, it is impossible towritten, and difficult not to wonder that say more here. We must pass over Coleridge's nephew did not refrain with the merest mention that quaint from printing, certain elaborate letters freak of Nemesis which made a mysof reproof, patronage, and good advice. terious Dissenting minister produceSo, too, the abuse and misrepresenta-" Wat Tyler" from nobody knows tion which Byron, and those who took where, and publish it as the work of their cue from Byron, lavished on a Tory laureate twenty-three yearsSouthey were inexcusable enough; but again one cannot help wishing that he had been a little less heartily convinced of the utter and extreme depravity and wickedness of these men. But there was no humbug in Southey; there was a great deal of virtue, and a virtuous man who is not something of a humbug is apt to be a little of a Pharisee unless he is a perfect saint, which Southey, to do him justice, was not. On the contrary, he was a man of middle earth, who was exceedingly fond of gooseberry tart and black currant rum, of strong ale and Rhenish, who loved to crack jokes, would give his enemy at least as good as he got from him, and was nearly as human as any one could desire.

Of his alleged tergiversation little need be said. Everybody, whatever his own politics, who has looked into the matter has long ago come to the conclusion that it was only tergiversation in appearance. Southey once said that political writing required a logical attitude of mind which he had not; and this is so true that it was a great pity he ever took to it. From sympathizing in a vague, youthful way with what he

after it was written by an undergraduate Jacobin, the oddity of the thing being crowned by Lord Eldon's characteristic refusal to grant an injunction on the ground that a man could not claim property in a work hurtful to the public, by this refusal assuring the free circulation of this hurtful work, instead of its suppression. And we can only allude to the not yet clearly intelligible negotiations, or misunderstandings, as to his succession to the editorship of the Quarterly Review when Gifford was failing. In these Southey seems to have somehow conceived that the place was his to take if he chose (which he never intended), or to allot to some one else as he liked; with the very natural result that a sort of bitterness, never completely removed and visible in the review's notice of his life, arose between him and Lockhart after the latter's appointment. His selection by Lord Radnor (who did not know him) as member for Downton in the last days of rotten boroughs, and his election without his knowing it, was another odd incident. The last important event of his life in this kind was the

offer of a baronetcy and the actual | year, though not published till a year conferring of an additional pension of after "Wat" was written, is now in a £300 by Peel, who, whatever faults he less virgin condition than her brother, may have had, was the only prime Southey having made large changes in minister since Harley who has ever the successive (five) early editions, and taken much real interest in the welfare others in the definitive one more than of men of letters. forty years after the first. Its popu

But we must turn to the works; and larity (for it was really popular) a mighty armful, or rather several shows rather the dearth of good poetry mighty armfuls, they are to turn to. at the time of its appearance than The poems, which are the chief stum-anything else. It displays very few bling-block, were collected by Southey of the merits of Southey's later long himself in ten very pretty little vol-poems, and it does display the chief umes in 1837-8. After his death they of all their defects, the defect which were more popularly issued in one, his Coleridge, during the tiff over Pancousin, the Rev. H. Hill, son by a late tisocracy, hit upon in a letter of marriage of the uncle who had been so which the original was advertised for good to him, editing a supernumerary sale only the other day. This fault volume of rather superfluous frag- consists in conveying to the reader a ments, the chief of which was an notion that the writer has said, "Go American tale called "Oliver New-to, let us make a poem," and has acman," on which Southey had been cordingly, to borrow the language of engaged for very many years. He had Joe Gargery's forge-song,

the good sense and pluck (indeed he
was never deficient in the second of
these qualities, and not often in the
first) to print "Wat Tyler" just as
the pirates had launched it after its
twenty-three years on the stocks. It is
very amusing, and exactly what might
be expected from a work written in
three days by a Jacobin boy who had
read a good many old plays. Canning,
Ellis, and Frere together could have
produced in fun nothing better than
this serious outburst of Wat's:

Think ye, my friend,
That I, a humble blacksmith, here in
Deptford,

Would part with these six groats, earned
with hard toil,

Beat it out, beat it out,
With a clink for the stout,

but with very little inspiration for the poetical. "Joan of Arc" is a most respectable poem, admirable in sentiment and not uninteresting as a tale in verse. But the conception is pedestrian, and the blank verse is to match.

Between this crude production and the very different "Thalaba" which followed it at some years' distance, Southey wrote very many, perhaps most, of his minor poems; and the characteristics of them may be best noticed together. In the earliest of all it must be confessed that the crotchet of thought and the mannerism of style

All that I have, to massacre the French- which drew down on him the lash

men,

Murder as enemies men I never saw,
Did not the State compel me?

of the "Anti-Jacobin" are very plentifully exhibited. A most schoolboy Pindaric is "The Triumph of Woman." One would like to have heard Mr. The strange mixture of alternate childWopsle in this part. For the rest, the ishness and pomposity which is almost thing contains some good blank verse, the sole tie between the Lake poets in and a couple of very pretty songs, their early work pervades all the poems considerably better, I should think, on the slave trade, the Botany Bay than most other things of the kind pub- eclogues, the sonnets, and the monolished in the year 1794, which was dramas. Even in the lyrical poems about the thickest of the dark before written at Bristol, or rather Westbury, the dawn of the "Lyrical Ballads." in the years 1798-9, there would be no “Joan of Arc," Wat's elder sister by a very noticeable advance if it were not

66

for the delightful "Holly Tree," from | Hatto," and the bishop may meet the which Hazlitt has extracted the well- modern taste even better than the old deserved text of a compliment more woman. The Fastrada story is too graceful than Hazlitt is usually cred- much vulgarized in King Charleited with conceiving, and which, with main," and it may be generally conthe "Stanzas written in my Library," fessed of Southey that to the finest is Southey's greatest achievement as touches of romance he was rather an occasional poet in the serious kind. insensitive, his nature lacking the His claims in the comic and mixed de-"strange and high " feeling of passion. partments are much more considerable. But he is thoroughly at home in "The "Abel Shufflebottom" is fun, and be- King of the Crocodiles." Everybody ing very early testifies to a healthy con- knows "The Inchcape Rock," and sciousness of the ridiculous. For his "The Well of St. Keyne," and "The English eclogues I have no great love; Battle of Blenheim ;" indeed it is very but it is something to say in their favor possible that they are the only things that they were the obvious inspiration of Southey that everybody does know. of Tennyson's English idylls as much The Spanish ballads are not nearly so in manner as in title. The ballads with good as Lockhart's; but Lockhart had the much-discussed "Devil's Walk" the illegitimate advantage of grafting as an early outsider in one key, and Scott's technique on Southey's special the curious "All for Love" as a late knowledge. Nevertheless it may be one in another, have much more to be said that all the ballads and metrical said for them than that in the same tales are to this day well worth readway they are the equally obvious origi-ing, that both Scott and Byron owed nators of the "Ingoldsby Legends." them not a little, and that they indicate They are not easily criticised in a few a vein in their author which might words. In themselves they were not have been worked in different circumquite fatherless, for "Monk" Lewis, stances to even better advantage. no great man of letters but something Still Southey's chief poetical claim is of a man of metre, had taught the not here; and the best of the things as author a good deal. They are nearly yet mentioned have been equalled by as unequal as another division of men with whom poetry was a mere Southey's own verse, his odes, of which occasional pastime. Of "The Vision it is perhaps sufficient to say here that of Judgment" it cannot be necessary they were remarkably like Young's, to say anything in detail. It is not so especially in the way in which they bad as those who only know it from rattle up and down the whole gamut Byron's triumphant castigation may from sublimity to absurdity. The bal- think; but otherwise I can only suplads frequently underlie the reproach pose that the devil, tired of Southey's of applying Voltairean methods to any- perpetual joking at him, was deterthing in which the author did not hap-mined to have his revenge, and that he pen to believe, while nothing made was permitted to do so by the Upper him more indignant than any such ap- Powers in consequence of the bumpplication by others to things in which tious Pharisaism of the preface. "The he did believe, a reproach urged Pilgrimage to Waterloo" and "The forcibly by Lamb in that undeserved Tale of Paraguay are poetically no but not unnatural attack in the London better though rather more mature than Magazine which Southey met with a "Joan of Arc; "Madoc" was adreally noble magnanimity. But at their mired by good men at its appearance, best they are very original for their but frequent attempts, made with the time, and very good for all time. best good will, have not enabled me to "The Old Woman of Berkeley," one place it much higher than these. of the oldest and perhaps the most popular in its day, is one of the best. It has a fair pendant in "Bishop

"Roderick," the last of the long poems in blank verse, is also, I think, by far the best. The absence of pulse

and throb in the verse, of freshness | paratives and allowances. Scott, aland inevitableness in the phrase and ways kind and well affected to Southey imagery, is indeed not seldom felt here as he was, appears to me to have been also; but there is something which a little unjust to this poem; an injusredeems it. The author's thorough tice which appears between the lines of knowledge of the details and atmo- his review of it, and in those of his sphere of his subject has vivified the reference to it in his biography. It is details and communicated the atmo- perfectly true, as he suggests, that sphere; the unfamiliarity and the Southey was specially prone to the romantic interest of the story are admirably given, and the thing is about as good as a long poem in blank verse which is not of the absolute first class can be.

Of "Thalaba" and "The Curse of Kehama" we must speak differently. The one was completely written, the other sketched and well begun, in that second sojourn at Lisbon which was Southey's golden time :

When, friends with love and leisure,
Youth not yet left behind,
He worked or played at pleasure,

Found God and Goddess kind;

general weakness of insisting on and clinging to his own weakest points. But this foible as it seems to me is less, not more, obvious in "The Curse of Kehama." In the first place the poet has given up the craze for irregular blank verse, and the additional charm of rhyme makes all the difference between this poem and "Thalaba." In the second place the central idea, — the acquisition, through prescribed means allowed by the gods, of a power greater than that of the gods themselves, by even the worst man who cares to go through the course - communicates a kind of antinomy of interest, a conflict of official and poetical justice which is unique, or, if not unique, rare out of Greek tragedy. The defeat of Kehama by his own wilful act in demanding the Amreetacup is as unexpected and as artistically effective as the maxim,

when his faculties, tolerably matured
by study, were still in their first fresh-
ness, and when he had not yet settled
down, and was not yet at all certain
that he should have to settle down, to
the dogged collar-work of his middle
and later age. I have no hesitation
as to which I prefer. The rhymeless
Pindarics of "Thalaba," written while
Southey was still under the influence
of that anti-rhyming heresy which no-
body but Milton has ever rendered to me.
orthodox by sheer stress of genius, are
a great drawback to the piece; there
are constant false notes like this of
Maimuna,

Her fine face raised to Heaven,
where the commonplace adjective mars
the passionate effect; and though the
eleventh and twelfth books, with the
journey to Domdaniel and the success-
ful attack on it, deserved to produce
the effect which they actually did pro-
duce on their own generation, the story
as a whole is a little devoid of interest.

All these weak points were strengthened and guarded in "The Curse of Kehama," the greatest thing by far that Southey did, and a thing, as I think, really great, without any com

Less than Omniscience could not suffice
To wield Omnipotence,

is philosophically sound. Moreover
the characters are interesting, at least
And then, to supplement these
several attractions, there are, for the
wicked men who love passages,"
quite delectable things. The author
pretended to think the famous and
beautiful,

They sin who tell us love can die, claptrap; if it be so, would he had sinned a little oftener in the same style. Nobody, except out of mere youthful paradox, can affect to undervalue the Curse itself. It is thoroughly good in scheme and in execution, in gross and in detail; there are no better six-and-twenty lines for their special purpose in all English poetry. But the finest scenes of the poem are ushered in by the description of the famous Sea City which Landor described over again