best have quite lost the bloom of their character, and degenerated, like the others, into servile placehunters, and gross editorial puffers of themselves. Mr. Southey, and even Mr. Wordsworth have both accepted offices under government, of such a nature, as absolutely ties up their independence; Mr. Coleridge, in pamphlets and newspapers, has done his best to deserve likewise; and yet they shall all tell you that they have not diminished their free spirit a jot. In like manner, they are as violent and intolerant against their old opinions, as ever they were against their new ones, and without seeing how far the argument carries, shall insist that no man can possess a decent head or respectable heart who does not agree with them. Persons who go to neither extreme, are of course to expect still less mercy, if possible. Mr. Southey, who is one of the pensioned reviewers in the Quarterly, does not blush to tell those who are acquainted with his former opinions of the great and their corruptions, that a mere stickler for Reform now-a-days, even with good intentions, is little

better than

a "house-breaker.'

Poor fellow! he

must have been a sad well-meaning profligate in his younger days!-It is in vain you tell such reasoners, that you are neither Jacobin nor courtier, that you have never made a noise about equality, as they did formerly, nor ever truckled to the vice of a court, as they do now :-you differ with them; and that is enough, with their intolerant egotism, to prove you either fool or knave.

The grossness of this utter defiance of candour and consistency would be too despicable for notice, did it not tend to bring all profession and principle into doubt,—and to add strength, by so doing, to the scepticism of men of the world, and bitterness to the reflections of those who suffer for being otherwise. But let us never forget to separate an honest and

See an article on the State of the Poor, in a late number of the Quarterly. I mention the authors of these reviews with the less scruple, because I think that anonymous writers in general have no right of concealment, particularly when they attack people in this manner,-and because I never thought myself at liberty to conceal my own name, when it either was asked or might be so.

tried consistency from the vague, complexional enthusiasm that starts away at the sight of danger, and runs into any and every extreme. The persons of whom we have been speaking have been always in extremes, and perhaps the good they are destined to perform in their generation, is to afford a striking lesson of the inconsistencies naturally produced by

so being. vanity.

Nothing remains the same but their

15 As soon as he saw him, Apollo seem'd pleas'd ;When this line was written, Mr. Southey had not quite thrown off the mask of independence, nor accepted those meaner laurels which Apollo would have had reason to disdain. Before that period, there was a native goodness about his character, and a taste for placid virtue in his writings, which conciliated regard and made us think of him with a pertinacious kindness. I will not answer, that my ideas of his poetry have not been of too high a description on this account, relying as they did on what appeared to be indicative of a finer species of mind,

and to promise something greater than he had yet performed; but let his praises remain ;—it is not worth while to alter them.

It may be as well however to mention, that though Mr. Southey is represented as admitted where Mr. Wordsworth is not, it is not meant to insinuate that he is a better poet, but merely that he has not so abused the comparative little that was expected of him. He is no more to be compared with Mr. Wordsworth in real genius than the man who thinks once out of a hundred times is with him who thinks the whole hundred; but that he is at the same time a poet, will be no more denied, than that the hundredth part of Mr. Wordsworth's genius would make a poet. His fancy perhaps has gone little beyond books, but still it is of a truly poetical character; he touches the affections pleasingly though not powerfully; and his moral vein stands him in stead, as it ought to do, of a good deal of dignity in other respects. What he wants in the gross, is a natural strength of thinking, and in the particular, a real style of his own; for as his simplicity is more a thing

of words than of thoughts, he naturally borrows his language from those who have thought for him. What Mr. Wordsworth conceals from you, or in fact overcomes by the growth of his own mind, Mr. Southey leaves open and bald,—a direct imitation, prominent with nothing but haths, ands, yeas, evens, and other fragments of old speech. As to his attempt to bring back the Cowleian licentiousness of metre in another shape, and with nothing like an ear to make it seducing, it is a mere excuse for haste and want of study.

To return to the line in the text,-Apollo, I am afraid, is not as easily to be defended as myself, for a want of foresight so unbecoming his prophetical character;-but this I leave to be settled by some future BURMAN or BIFFIUS, whenever he shall do me the honour to find out the learning of this egregious performance, and publish the Feast of the Poets in two volumes quarto. Apollo, like other vivacious spirits, chose to do without his foresight sometimes,

as the commentator will no doubt have the good. ness to shew for me.

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