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have left ourselves but little space for noticing the details of his domestic and public life, as they may be gleaned from the last two volumes of his "Life and Correspondence."

It is most truly observed by his son, that

"A more thoroughly domestic man, or one more simple in his mode of living, it would be difficult to picture; and the habits into which he settled himself about this time continued through life, unbroken reguJarity and unwearied industry being their chief characteristics. Habitually an early riser, he never encroached upon the hours of the night; and finding his highest pleasure and his recreation in the very pursuits necessary for earning his daily bread, he was, probably, more continually employed than any other writer of his generation. My actions,' he writes about this time to a friend, are as regular as those of St. Dunstan's quarterboys. Three pages of history after breakfast (equivalent to five in small quarto printing); then to transcribe and copy for the press, or to make my selections and biographies, or what else suits my humour, till dinner time; from dinner till tea I read, write letters, see the newspaper, and very often indulge in a siesta-for sleep agrees

with me, and I have a good substantial theory to prove that it must; for as a man who walks much requires to sit down and rest himself, so does the brain, if it be the part most worked, require its repose. Well, after tea, I go to poetry, and correct, and rewrite and copy till I am tired, and then turn to anything else till supper; and this is my life-which, if it be not a very merry one, is yet as happy as heart could wish. At least I should think so if I had not once been happier; and I do think so, except when that recollection comes upon me. And then, when I cease to be cheerful, it is only to become contemplative-to feel at times a wish that I was in that state of existence which passes not away; and this always ends in a new impulse to proceed, that I may leave some durable monument and some eflicient good behind me.''

An old and rich uncle, John Southey, from whom he might have expected something, died childless, making no mention of him in his will. His feelings on the occasion were expressed. in the following lines, in which he communicated the event to a friend, by whom they were accidentally preserved:

"So thou art gone at last, old John,

And hast left all from me:
God give thee rest among the blest-
I lay no blame to thee.

"Nor marvel I, for though one blood

Through both our veins was flowing,
Full well I know, old man, no love
From thee to me was owing.

"Thou hadst no anxious hopes for me,
In the winning years of infancy,

No joy in my up-growing;

And when from the worll's beaten way
I turned 'mid rugged paths astray,
No fears where I was going.

"It touched thee not if envy's voice
Was busy with my name;
Nor did it make thy heart rejoice
To hear of my fair fame,

"Old man, thou liest upon thy bier,

And none for thee will shed a tear!

They'll give thee a stately funeral,

With coach and hearse, and plume and pall;

But they who follow will grieve no more

Than the mutes who pace with their staves before.

With a light heart and a cheerful face

Will they put mourning on,

And bespeak thee a marble monument,
And think nothing more of old John.

"An enviable death is his,

Who, leaving none to deplore him,

Hath yet a joy in his passing hour,

Because all he loved have died before him.

The monk, too, hath a joyful end,

And well may welcome death like a friend,
When the crucifix close to his heart is press'd,
And he piously crosses his arms on his breast.

And the brethren stand round him and sing him to rest,
And tell him, as sure he believes, that anon,
Receiving his crown, he shall sit on his throne,
And sing in the choir of the blest.

"But a hopeless sorrow it strikes to the heart,
To think how men like thee depart.
Unloving and joyless was thy life,
Unlamented was thine end;

And neither in this world nor the next
Hadst thou a single friend :

None to weep for thee on earth,
None to greet thee in heaven's hall;
Father and mother, sister and brother-
Thy heart had been shut to them all.

"Alas, old man, that this should be!
One brother had raised up seed to thee;
And hadst thou, in their hour of need,
Cherished that dead brother's seed,

Thrown wide thy doors, and called them in,
How happy thine old age had been!

Thou wert a barren tree, around whose trunk,
Needing support, our tendrils should have clung;
Then had thy sapless boughs

With buds of hope and genial fruit been hung;
Yea, with undying flowers,
And wreaths for ever young."

But he had the true riches-a healthy mind, an honest heart, a rising reputation, and an approving con

science.

When we consider his pressing occupations, and the value of his time to himself and those who were dependent upon him, it is amazing how much of it he was able to devote to the good of others. To that most amiable and promising young person, Kirke White, only known to him by his genius and his virtues, he was, while he lived, a friend and counsellor; and when mental powers, tasked too severely, hurried him prematurely to the grave, the poet mourned over him as a kindred spirit gone to his everlasting rest; and volunteered to collate and edit his "Remains," prefixing to them a biographical notice, by which he had the happiness of realising a considerable sum for the benefit of his family.

Other instances are on record which prove the heartiness of his good-will to direct and benefit struggling genius. To Ebenezer Elliott his letters are many, and his advice excellent; and doubtless that hard-handed and softhearted individual appreciated them as they deserved. To a Mr. Duseautoy, a young gentleman, who without any

previous knowledge of him, solicited his advice, submitting to him some of his productions, he was equally kind and encouraging, and wrote to him, amidst all his heavy labours, with a fulness of affectionate interest such as a father might feel for a promising and favourite son. The youth entered the university, and would, in all human likelihood, have been a distinguished ornament of his country, had not the keenness of his intellectual ardour been an over-match for his vital powers. He perished, as poor Kirke White did, in the blossom of his hopes, affording another instance to the many already on record, of victims to the eager pursuit of university honours, which all who are acquainted with college life in any of our three great universities must know, and the remembrance of which so often passes like a shadow over them when they review their college recollections.

Meanwhile the indefatigable poet was busy with his more imperious labours. He was adding daily to the stores of knowledge which were to furnish the materials for a history of Portugal. He was consuming many a weary hour upon notices of current literature, by which he enriched, much

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more than they enriched him, the various periodicals of the day. 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.

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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 thec 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 old 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

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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 "Quar

terly 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 :-

"To Grosvenor C. Bedford, Esq.

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"Nov. 17, 1808. "MY DEAR GROSVENOR, You have taken what I said a little too seriously; that is, you have given it more thought than it deserved. The case stands thus: you wish to serve the public, ministers wish to serve themselves; and so it happens that, just at this time, the two objects are the same. am very willing to travel with them as far as we are going the same way, and, when our roads separate, shall of course leave them.'"

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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 iny 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

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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 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 editer 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,

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