more than they enriched him, the various periodicals of the day. Of the various hostile criticisms which "Thalaba" and "Madoc" had provoked, he had to encounter the buzzings and the stings, against which no stoicism could have steeled any mind, for their ability was in some instances equal to their malignity. And "Kehama" was in hand, from which, such was the damaging influence of the "Edinburgh Review" upon his reputation, whatever might be his anticipations of future fame, he could look for little present emolument. It appear ed-and justified both his hopes and

his fears.

This poem, probably the most strik ing and original of any that he had yet designed, encountered a perfect tornado of hostility from his old enemy, the late Lord Jeffrey. The moral which it aimed to inculcate was, the ultimate triumph of suffering virtue, and the ultimate defeat and punishment of long-triumphant godlessness and malignity. Into the details of its execution we cannot enter; but one passage we must give, as a fair specimen of the metre and style; and we give it the more especially, because it is the one which the reviewer selects as an example of the crudest and the silliest absurdity. The reader shall judge for himself.

Kehama, glorying in his power, and proceeding in a career of conquest by which he fondly hopes to achieve immortality and omnipotence, is wounded in the tenderest part by one, who, to save his child from attempted violation, kills his son. The shade of the dead Arnalan is evoked, and asked what his all-powerful father shall do for him to soothe his troubled spirit. He asks for revenge; the vengeance of intense and never-ending agony upon him by whom he was deprived of life. It is The Curse" by which this wish was to be gratified, which we now desire to submit to the judgment of the reader, who, to understand it aright, must project himself into the spirit of the scene, and become, as it were, en rapport" with the describer.

In the basilisk glance of the enchanter, Ladurlad foresees his doom; although no intimation of the agonies which await him is to be found in the commencing words of the imprecation,

which, as it were, shield him against all human accidents, and rivet him to life, but only to be the subject of the most intense and enduring tortures. They are smoother than oil, and yet they are very swords. Wrath compressed scintillates through them. Apparently fraught with blessings, they are the studied result of vengeance the most ruthless dallying with its victim, while fixing and preparing him for the fatal blow. And when the collected thunder does burst forth, it is as though Omnipotence itself were almost baffled by the greedy and gluttonous spirit of revenge; and expression breaks down in its attempt to convey, in adequate terms, the insatiable malignity of the fell avenger. For a moment, utterly heedless of Ladurlad's cries for mercy

"Silent he stood,

But in no mood of mercy,
In no hesitating thought

Of right and justice. At the length he raised
His brow, yet unrelaxed, his lips unclosed,
And, uttered from the heart,

With the whole feeling of his soul enforced, The gathered vengeance came!

"I charm thy life

From the weapons of strife,
From stone and from wood,
From fire and from flood,
From the serpent's tooth,
And the beast of blood ;-
From sickness I charm thee,
And time shall not harm thee:
But earth, which is mine,
Its fruits shall deny thee;
And water shall hear me,
And know thee, and fly thee;
And the winds shall not touch thee
When they blow by thee,
And the dews shall not wet thee
When they fall nigh thee;—
Thou shalt call upon death
To release thee-in vain!
For thy pain shall remain,
While Kehama shall reign,
With a fire in thy heart,
And a fire in thy brain;-
And sleep shall obey me,
And visit thee never;
And the curse shall be on thee,
For ever and ever!"

The victim reels under the imprecation. All is, momentarily, unrealised around him. But the curse has taken possession. He soon feels its terrible reality; and that of his torments there shall be no end!

"There, where the curse had stricken

him,

There stood the miserable man!

There stood Ladurlad!

With loose, hanging arms,
And eyes of idiot wandering!

"Was it a dream? Alas!

He heard the river flow;

He heard the crumbling of the pile;
He heard the rustling of the wind, which
showered

The thin, white ashes round;-
There, motionless, he stood-
As if he wished it were a dream;
And feared to move,
Lest he should prove

The actual misery ;—

And still, at times, he met Kehama's eye; Kehama's eye, that fastened on him still."

And now we leave the reader to judge between Southey and his reviewer. Not such was Walter Savage Landor, to whose encouragement we are chiefly indebted for that completion and publication of the noble poem. But we shall suffer the poet to speak for himself. He thus writes to his friend Bedford, in a letter bearing date April 26, 1808 :

"At Bristol I met with the man of all others whom I was most desirous of meeting, the only man living of whose praise I was ambitious, or whose censure would have humbled me. You will be curious to know who this could be. Savage Landor, the author of Gebir, a poem which, unless you have heard me speak of it, you have probably never heard of at all. I never saw any one more unlike myself in every prominent part of human character, nor any one who so cordially and instinctively agreed with me on so many of the most important subjects. I have often said before we met, that I would walk forty miles to see him; and having seen him, I would gladly walk fourscore to see him again. He talked of Thalaba, and I told him of the series of mythological poems which I had planned,--mentioned some of the leading incidents on which they were to have been formed, and also told him for what reason they were laid aside;-in plain English, that I could not afford to write them. Landor's reply was, Go on with them, and I will pay for printing them, as many as you will write and as many copies as you please.' I had reconciled myself to my abdication (if the phrase may be allowable), and am not sure that this princely offer has not done me mischief; for it has awakened in me oll dreams and hopes which had been laid aside, and a stinging desire to go on, for the sake of showing him poem after poem, and

saying, I need not accept your offer, but I have done this because you made it.' It is something to be praised by one's peers; ordinary praise I regard as little as ordinary abuse. God bless you!"

In politics, his conjectures were singularly sagacious. At a very early period of the peninsular war, he thus writes to Coleridge in the June of 1808:

"One hardly dares to indulge a hope; but if Europe is to be redeemed in our days, you know it has always been my opinion that the work of deliverance would begin in Spain. And now that its unhappy government has committed suicide, the Spaniards have got rid of their worst enemy."

To Grosvenor Bedford he writes, in the November following:

"What I feel about Spain, you know; what I think about it is this-the country has much to suffer; in all probability there will be many and dreadful defeats of the patriots, and such scenes as have never been witnessed in Europe since the destruction of Saguntum and Numantia, may, perhaps, be renewed there. Joseph will very likely be crowned at Madrid, and many of us may give up the cause of Spanish independence as lost. But so surely as God liveth, and the Spirit of God liveth and moveth in the hearts of men, so surely will that country eventually work out its own redemption."

This was written while the "Quarterly Review" was being projected, a publication in which it was intended that he should bear a part. At first he feared that it might not be suffi ciently independent in its politics to enable him to contribute to it with perfect satisfaction. His son tells us that

"The circumstance of there being reason to expect 'political information to be communicated from authentic sources,' seemed to him to imply that silence would be observed on such points as it might be unpleasing to the ministry to have strongly animadverted upon, and he consequently expresses these fears to Mr. Bedford in the strong language he naturally used to a familiar correspondent. This produced a further exposition of the principles upon which the 'Review' was to be conducted; and his reply will show, that notwithstanding these passing doubts, he entered at the first heartily and zealously into the plan.

"It is however right to state, that at no period could the 'Quarterly Review' be said fairly to represent my father's opinions,

political or otherwise, and great injustice was often done him both by imputing articles to him which he never wrote, and also by supposing that, in those known to be his, all his mind had appeared. The truth was, as his letters will show, that his views on most subjects, while from this time they gradually drew nearer to those of the Tory party, yet occasionally differed widely from them, and most certainly were never those of a blind, time-serving, and indiscriminating allegiance. In his contributions to the 'Quarterly Review' these differences of opinion were broadly stated, and measures often recommended of a very different character to those which that party adopted. This might be, and probably was, sometimes done in a manner which admitted, and, perhaps, required, the editor's correction; but it would seem that Gifford had a heavy and unsparing hand in these matters, and my father frequently and bitterly complains of the mutilation of his papers, and of their being tamed down to the measure of the politics the 'Review' was intended to represent, and gauged often by ministerial timidity. This, it appears from the following letter, he apprehended would sometimes be the case, but not to the extent to which it was subsequently carried :

:

In this great periodical, it is unnecessary to say, he continued to write while he was able to wield a pen. In fact, his receipts from it constituted, for a long time, the principal part of his subsistence.

But we must not omit a curious fact which came to light while he was proceeding in his history of Brazil, which shows the caution to be used in adopting, without severe scrutiny, the translations or the compilations of Romish writers. He thus writes to his brother, a naval lieutenant, in a letter bearing date January 10, 1809:

"I made an important discovery relative to De Lery-one of my best printed authorities-this morning. This author, who though a Frenchman, was a very faithful writer, translated his own French into Latin, and I used the Latin edition in De Boy's

collection, you remember the book with those hideous prints of the savages at their cannibal feasts; William Taylor laid hands on the French book, and sent it me; it arrived last Thursday only; and I, in transcribing with my usual scrupulous accuracy, constantly referred to this original, because I knew that when an author translates his own book, he often alters it, and therefore it was probable that I might sometimes find a difference worthy of notice. Well, I found my own references to the number of the chapter wrong; for the first time it past well enough for a blunder, though I wondered at it a little, being remarkably exact in these things; the second time I thought it very extraordinary; and a third instance made me quite certain that something was wrong, but that the fault was not in me. Upon examination, it appeared that a whole chapter, and that chapter the most important as to the historical part of the volume, had been omitted by De Boy, because he was a Catholic, De Lery a Huguenot, and this chapter exposed the villany of Villegagnon, who went to Brazil expressly to establish an asylum for the Huguenots; when there, was won over by the Guises, apostatised, and thus ruined a colony, which must else inevitably have made Rio de Janeiro now the capital of a French, instead of a Portuguese empire. The main facts I had collected before, and clearly understood; but the knavery of a Roman Catholic editor had thus nearly deprived me of my best and fullest authority, and of some very material circumstances, for no one has ever yet suspected this collection of being otherwise than faithful, though it is now more than two hundred years old. See here the necessity of tracing everything to the fountain-head when it is possible."

Speaking of a review of Miss Owenson (the present Lady Morgan), which appeared in the "Quarterly," he says:

"I could have wished that this 'Review' had less resembled the Edinburgh' in the tone and temper of its criticisms. That book of Miss Owenson's is, I dare say, very bad both in manners and morals; yet, had it fallen into my hands, I think I could have told her so in such a spirit, that she herself would have believed me, and might have profited by the censure. The same quantity of rain which would clear a flower of its blights, will, if it falls heavier and harder, wash the roots bare, and beat the blossoms to the ground."

His friend Landor wonders how he can be engaged, with all his other avocations, upon two long poems at the same time. His answer is:

"You wonder that I can think of two poems at once; it proceeds from weakness,

not from strength. I could not stand the continuous excitement which you have gone through in your tragedy in me it would not work itself off in tears; the tears would flow while in the act of composition, and would leave behind a throbbing head and a whole system in the highest state of nervous excitability, which would soon induce disease in one of its most fearful forms. From such a state I recovered in 1800 by going to Portugal, and suddenly changing climate, Occupation, and all internal objects: and I have kept it off since by a good intellectual regimen."

Of Shelley he writes in the January of 1812:

"Here is a man at Keswick, who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son to the member for Shoreham; with £6000 a year entailed upon him, and as much more in his father's power to cut off. Beginning with romances of ghosts and murder, and with poetry at Eton, he passed, at Oxford, into metaphysics; printed half-adozen pages, which he entitled "The Necessity of Atheism;' sent one anonymously to Coplestone, in expectation, I suppose, of converting him; was expelled in consequence; married a girl of seventeen, after being turned out of doors by his father; and here they both are, in lodgings, living upon £200 a year, which her father allows them. He is come to the fittest physician in the world. At present he has got to the Pantheistic stage of philosophy, and, in the course of a week, I expect he will be a Berkleyan, for I have put him upon a course of Berkeley. It has surprised him a good deal to meet, for the first time in his life, with a man who perfectly understands him, and does him full justice. I tell him that all the difference between us is that he is nineteen, and I am thirty-seven; and I dare say it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing him that he may be a true philosopher, and do a great deal of good, with £6,000 a year; the thought of which troubles him a great deal more at present than ever the want of sixpence (for I have known such a want) did me. God help us! the world wants mending, though he did not set about it exactly in the right way. God bless you, Grosvenor!"

The following is his estimate of the comparative merits of Perceval and Lord Liverpool. We believe it to be strictly correct :

"Perceval's death was one of the severest losses that England has ever sustained. He was a man who not only desired to act well, but desired it ardently; his heart always strengthened his understanding, and gave

him that power which rose always to the measure of the occasion. Lord Liverpool is a cold man; you may convince his understanding, but you can only obtain an inert assent where zealous co-operation is wanted. It is, however, enough for us to know what ought to be done: the how and the when are in the hands of One who knows when and how it may be done best. Oh ! if this world of ours were but well cultivated, and weeded well, how like the garden of Eden might it be made! Its evils might almost be reduced to physical suffering and death; the former continually diminishing, and the latter, always indeed an awful thing, but yet to be converted into hope and joy."

That Southey should have rejoiced intensely at the termination of the war (as it did terminate, in the complete overthrow of the tyrant by whom the Continent was held spell-bound) and the restoration of social order, could have surprised no one who knew how frequently he predicted these results, and how earnestly he had conjured the honest public men of all parties to forget their differences, and make a vigorous effort against the common enemy. Bonaparte he regarded as an impersonation of evil, truthless, faithless, ruthless, bloody; and he himself entertained no more doubt of his final overthrow than he did that there was a God in heaven. But the whole utilitarian and materialist school of philosophers regarded him quite in another light. The great political meteor who had affrighted the nations, and, from his horrid hair, shook pestilence and war, they looked upon as a new sun in the firmament, by whom it sold glories were to be obscured.

They believed that his mission of destruction was the necessary precursor of his mission of regeneration; and that, when old things had thus been made to pass away, we should have a new heaven and a new earth, wherein liberty alone should dwell. When it is considered that the parties by whom his fortunes as an author had been seriously blighted were sharers in these opinions, the reader cannot be surprised that he should have doubly rejoiced, in the falsification of their predictions, and the fulfilment of his His son writes :

own.

"How deep an interest my father had taken in the protracted contest between France and England, the reader has seen; nor will he, I think, if well acquainted with

the events of those times, and the state of feeling common among young men of the more educated classes at the close of the last century, be apt to censure him as grossly inconsistent, because he condemned the war at its outset, and augured well at the commencement of Bonaparte's career, and yet could earnestly desire that war, in its later stages, to be carried on with all the heart, and all the soul, and all the strength of this mighty empire,' and could rejoice in the downfall

Of him, who, while Europe crouched under his rod,

Put his trust in his fortune, and not in his God.'

But

For the original commencement of the war in 1792-3 had been the combination of other European powers against revolutionary France a direct act of aggression supported by England, which would now be condemned by most men, and was then naturally denounced by all those who partook, in any degree, of Republican feeling. in the lapse of years the merits of the contest became quite altered; and from about the time when Bonaparte assumed the imperial crown, all his acts were marked by aggressiveness and overbearing usurpation. Not to speak of those personal crimes which turned my father's feelings towards the man into intense abhorrence, his political measures with respect to Switzerland, Holland, Egypt, and Malta were those of an unscrupulous and ambitious conqueror; and the invasion of Portugal, with his insolent treachery towards the Spanish royal family, made his iniquity intolerable. The real difference between my father and the mass of writers and speakers in England at that time, was, that he never laid aside a firm belief that the Providence of God would put an end to Napoleon's wicked career, and that it was the office of Great Britain to be the principal instrument of that Providence.

"But in addition to the national feelings of joy and triumph at the successful termination of this long and arduous warfare, my father had some grounds for rejoicing more peculiar to himself. When one large and influential portion of the community, supported by the Edinburgh Review,' prognosticated constantly the hopelessness of the war, the certain triumph of Bonaparte, and especially the folly of hoping to drive him out of Spain when their language was, 'France has conquered Europe; this is the melancholy truth; shut our eyes to it as we may, there can be no doubt about the matter; for the present, peace and submission must be the lot of the vanquished; he had stood forth among the boldest and most prominent of those who urged vigorous measures, and prophesied final success. And well might he now rejoice-kindle upon Skiddaw the symbol of triumph; and when contrasting the lan

guage he had held with that of those persons, exclaim, Was I wrong? or has the event corresponded to this confidence?" "

The account of the bonfire upon Skiddaw, above alluded to, we must present to the reader as he himself describes it in a letter to his brother, Dr. Southey. When we consider the scene, the occasion, and the actors engaged in it, it will be read with intense interest, and not more by the present, than by generations to come :

66

Monday, the 21st of August, was not

a more remarkable day in your life than it was in that of my neighbour Skiddaw, who is a much older personage. The weather served for our bonfire, and never, I believe, was such an assemblage upon such a spot. To my utter astonishment, Lord Sunderlin rode up, and Lady S., who had endeavoured to dissuade me from going as a thing too dangerous, joined the walking party. Wordsworth, with his wife, sister, and eldest boy, came over on purpose. James Boswell arrived that morning at the Sunderlin's. Edith, the senhora, Edith May, and Herbert were my convoy, with our three maid-servants, some of our neighbours, some adventurous Lakers, and Messrs. Rag, Tag, and Boptail, made up the rest of the assembly. We roasted beef and boiled plum-puddings there; sungGod save the king' round the most furious body of flaming tar-barrels that I ever saw; drank a huge wooden bowl of punch; fired cannon at every health, with three times three, and rolled large blazing balls of tow and turpentine down the steep side of the mountain. The effect was grand beyond imagination. We formed a huge circle round the most intense light, and behind us was an immeasurable arch of the most intense darkness, for our bonfire fairly put out the moon.

"The only mishap which occurred will make a famous anecdote in the life of a great poet, if James Boswell, after the example of his father, keepeth a diary of the sayings of remarkable men. When we were craving for the punch, a cry went forth that the kettle had been knocked over, with all the boiling water! Colonel Barker, as Boswell named the Senhora, from her having had the command on this occasion, immediately instituted a strict inquiry to discover the culprit, from a suspicion that it might have been done in mischief, water, as you know, being a commodity not easily replaced on the summit of Skiddaw. The persons about the fire declared it was one of the gentlemen-they did not know his name; but he had a red cloak on; they pointed him out in the circle. The red cloak (a maroon one of Edith's) identified him; Wordsworth had got hold of it, and was equipped like a Spa