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volume-Moore, Byron, Shelley, Hazlitt, Haydon, Leigh Hunt, Lamb-what resemblance do ye find among all or any of these men? and how could any sort of system or plan be carried on, or attempted amongst them? However, let M Southey look to himself since the wine is tapped, let him drink it.

(1818, November 24. Letter 723, to John Murray, Vol. IV., p. 271.)

You have had the second canto of Don Juan which you will publish with the first, if it please you. But there shall be no mutilations in either, nor omissions, except such as I have already indicated in letters to which I have had no answer. I care nothing for what may be said, or thought, or written, on the subject. If the poem is, or appears, dull, it will fail; if not, it will succeed.. There are some words in the Address to the Scoundrel Southey which I requested Mr H. to omit, and some stanzas about Castlereagh, which cannot decently appear as I am at too great a distance to answer the latter, if he wished it, personally; the former is as great a coward as he is a Renegade, and distance can make no odds in speaking of him-as he dare do nothing but scribble even to his next neighbour; but the other villain is at least a brave one, and I would not take advantage of the Alps and the Ocean to assail him when he could not revenge himself. As for the rest I will never flatter Cant, but, if you choose, I will publish a preface saying that you are all hostile to the publication. You may publish anonymously,

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or not, as you think best for any reasons of your

own.

(1819, April 3. Letter 729, to John Murray, Vol. IV., p. 281.)

The ladies are not sisters. One is Godwin's daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft, and the other the present M Godwin's daughter by a former husband. So much for Scoundrel Southey's story of "incest"; neither was there any promiscuous intercourse whatever. Both are an invention of that execrable villain Southey, whom I will term so as publicly as he deserves.

(1819, May 15. Letter 733, to John Murray,

Vol. IV., p. 298.)

How far this man, who, as author of Wat Tyler, has been maintained by the Lord Chancellor guilty of a treasonable and blasphemous libel, and denounced in the House of Commons, by the upright and able member for Norwich, as a "rancorous renegado," be fit for sitting as a judge upon others, let others judge. He has said that for this expression "he brands William Smith on the forehead as a calumniator," and that "the mark will outlast his epitaph." How long William Smith's epitaph will last, and in what words it will be written, I know not, but William Smith's words form the epitaph itself of Robert Southey. He has written Wat Tyler, and taken the office of poet laureate he has, in the Life of Henry Kirke White, denominated reviewing "the ungentle craft," and has become a reviewer-he was one of the projectors of a scheme, called "pantisocracy,"

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for having all things, including women, in common, (query, common women ?), and he sets up as a moralist -he denounced the battle of Blenheim, and he praised the battle of Waterloo-he loved Mary Wollstoncraft, and he tried to blast the character of her daughter (one of the young females mentioned)-he wrote treason, and serves the king-he was the butt of the Anti-Jacobin, and he is the prop of the Quarterly Review; licking the hands that smote him, eating the bread of his enemies, and internally writhing beneath his own contempt,-he would fain conceal, under anonymous bluster, and a vain endeavour to obtain the esteem of others, his leprous sense of his own degradation. What is there in such a man to "envy"? Who ever envied the envious? Is it his birth, his name, his fame, or his virtues, that I am to "envy"? I was born of the aristocracy, which he abhorred; and am sprung, by my mother, from the kings who preceded those whom he has hired himself to sing. It cannot, then, be his birth. As a poet, I have, for the past eight years, had nothing to apprehend from a competition; and for the future, "that life to come in every poet's creed," it is open to all. I will only remind M Southey, in the words of a critic, who, if still living, would have annihilated Southey's literary existence now and hereafter, as the sworn foe of charlatans and imposters, from Macpherson downwards, that "those dreams were Settle's once and Ogilby's"; and for my own part, I assure him, that whenever he and his sect are remembered, I shall be proud to be 'forgot." That he is not content with his success as a poet may reasonably be believed he has been

the nine-pin of reviews; the Edinburgh knocked him down, and the Quarterly set him up; the government found him useful in the periodical line, and made a point of recommending his work to purchasers, so that he is occasionally bought (I mean his books, as well as the author), and may be found on the same shelf, if not upon the table, of most of the gentlemen employed in the different offices. With regard to his private virtues, I know nothing-of his principles, I have heard enough. As far as having been, to the best of my power, benevolent to others, I do not fear the comparison; and for the errors of the passions, was M Southey always so tranquil and stainless? Did he never covet his neighbour's wife? Did he never calumniate his neighbour's wife's daughter, the offspring of her he coveted? So much for the apostle of pantisocracy.

Mr Southey may applaud himself to the world, but he has his own heartiest contempt; and the fury with which he foams against all who stand in the phalanx which he forsook, is, as William Smith described it, "the rancour of the renegado," the bad language of the prostitute who stands at the corner of the street, and showers her slang upon all, except those who may have bestowed upon her her "little shilling.'

Hence his quarterly overflowings, political and literary, in what he has himself termed "the ungentle craft," and his especial wrath against Mr Leigh Hunt, notwithstanding that Hunt has done more for Wordsworth's reputation as a poet (such as it is), than all the Lakers could in their interchange of selfpraises for the last twenty-five years. . . . A paper of the Connoisseur says, that "it is observed by the

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French, that a cat, a priest, and an old woman, are sufficient to constitute a religious sect in England.' The same number of animals, with some difference in kind, will suffice for a poetical one. If we take Sir George Beaumont instead of the priest, and Mr Wordsworth for the old woman, we shall nearly complete the quota required; but I fear that M Southey will but indifferently represent the CAT, having shown himself but too distinctly to be of a species to which that noble creature is peculiarly hostile. [This reply was also suppressed.]

(1820, March 15. Byron's reply to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, made in a letter to J. D. Israeli, Esq., Vol. IV., p. 482.)

I have erased the six stanzas [in Don Juan, canto 3] about those two imposters, Southey and Wordsworth (which I suppose will give you great pleasure), but I can do no more.

(1820, April 23. Letter 794, to John Murray, Vol. V., p. 16.)

I return you the packets. The prose (the Edin. Mag. answer) looks better than I thought it would, and you may publish it: there will be a row, but I'll fight it out one way or another. You are wrong: I never had those "two ladies," upon my honour! Never believe but half of such stories. Southey was a damned scoundrel to spread such a lie of a woman, whose mother he did his best to get and could not.

(1820, May 20. Letter 798, to John Murray, Vol. V., p. 27.)