Some Southey Letters

IN the Selected Letters of Southey, edited by his son-in-law, the Rev. J. W. Warter, appear a considerable number written to him by his constant friend Mary Barker. The editor there states that these letters were sent from France by her husband, Mr. Slade, and also tells us that Mary Barker — or Mrs. Slade, as she became on her marriage — was an early Portuguese friend, and is “ the Bhow Begum ” of The Doctor.

I have now before me Southey’s letters to Mary Barker; and among them are many which as yet, I believe, have never been published. The whole series extends over a period of more than twenty-five years, from 1800 to 1826. At the foot of the first, written from Lisbon, Miss Barker has placed this note : “ The first letter I ever received from dear Southey.” In the same letter Southey writes : “ If you go thro’ Plymouth and the fleet be there, I have a brother on Board the Bellona, who will show you what is to be seen : . . . only send to him in my name, and he will have brains enough in two minutes to see that you are not a mere Lisbon acquaintance. God bless you. I love Cintra dearly, but I would rather the rock went to England than you. Do not fail or delay to inform us of your arrival. I will watch the seeding flowers, and send you my Wall and the Cork tree in most accurate painting.”

The “ Senhora Barker,” or the “ Senhora,” as Southey calls her, remained his true friend for many a year. Professor Dowden, while numbering the goodly company who become familiar to us as we read Southey’s correspondence, speaks of her as known to us for “frank familiarities and warm womanly services.” It is to her Southey turns often when in trouble. It is to her he writes both on the occasion of the loss of his mother, and from the deathbed of his little daughter Margaret, in 1803. He and his heartbroken wife visited her on their way from Bristol to Greta Hall, at Keswick, which was to be their home, although then they knew it not. “ Would that we were at Keswick! ” he writes. “Would that the winter were over! However, there are the books and the lakes and the mountains to comfort me.” It is Mary Barker who has written at the end of one of Southey’s letters, referring to the death, in 1816, of Southey’s dear son, the greatest sorrow which ever befell him : “ Herbert! that sweetest and most perfect of all children on this earth, who died in my arms at nine years of age, whose death I announced to his Father and Mother in their bed, where I had prayed and persuaded them to go. When Southey could speak, his first words were : ' The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord ! ’ Never can I forget that moment.” For some time she was a close neighbor of the Southeys at Keswick. In a letter not dated, but which we may assign to about the year 1810, urging her to come and live at Keswick, we have a light thrown for us by Southey himself on their relations. “ I do not think,” he writes, “ anything could induce more to your own happiness. I am sure nothing could add so much to mine ; and I am willing to believe that if you have no friend who possibly can love you better, so there should be none to whose society you should more naturally look for as much enjoyment as the untoward circumstances of life have left to your portion. Ten years’ intimacy, and more intercourse during those years than often falls to the lot of persons of different sexes who are not related, has given us a thorough knowledge of each other and mutual esteem.”

The letters are written without reserve, and often at intervals of only a few days. They give us a history of Southey’s life during these years, his achievements, his hopes, his troubles, with many a light thrown on his own books, and much criticism on his contemporaries and their work. We seem to see through them his fine, though outwardly cold nature unfolding ; we see the honest and constant industry of the man, carrying out his own motto, “ In labore quies,” and happily blessed with confidence in his own powers ; and we see him in his humor and play on words, and think that he might even bandy jests and puns not unworthily with his friend Charles Lamb. Through all shines the strong love which in his sensitive and reserved nature he bore to home and friends.

In 1809, when his little daughter Emma is ill, he writes : " It is my nature to be over - anxious about these things. God be praised ! not about any others.” As to his worldly affairs he can say : “ Your dreams of my golden fortunes to come make me smile. The world, I believe, will always keep me lean and hungry, like a grey-hound, as if abundance would spoil me, and I should wax fat like Jeshurun and kick if I were not kept down by hard usage. This will be no matter a hundred years hence, and it is not much matter now.”

An amusing passage from a letter of 1807 shows us his shy reserve : “ I am not a very great favourite [of Sir George Beaumont], and not likely to become so. My lady, the first time I saw her. put out the horns of her amiability full butt against me, like a snail after a storm — upon which the horns of ray agreabeauness [this is one of the punning gender terminations Southey loved to make] instinctively drew in and I got into my shell — and a plaguey rough shell I daresay she thinks it — and there I sat. When last in town, I dined with them one day ; open-mouthed as an oyster at ebb, and as silent too, being in truth miserably ill. But, Senhora, I have a good faculty of not talking much to people whom I am not fond of. Now and then, indeed, the Devil has tempted me with his damned Ephphatha, but not very often, and not very lately, and I defy him and all his works.”

Yet assuredly Southey does not appear only with a halo round his head; a very natural man appears, with a power of strong speech in denunciation both of public men and private friends. It must be admitted, too, that the vanity whereof he accuses Coleridge and Wordsworth is constantly evident in his own case in these letters.

Thus in 1806 he writes : That rascal little Moore (for I may call a man a rascal who will be the pimp of posterity as long as his writings last) has got more by his song of ‘ Oh Lady Fair ’ than I shall ever do by Madoc — the best poem, though I say it, in the language, except the Paradise Lost. However, I have my pleasure for my pains, and am determined to have as much pleasure of that kind as possible.”

Of his History of Brazil he writes in 1811: “ It will be a good book, containing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; but I am by no means sanguine about its sale, nor, tho’ I have no doubts about its final reputation, do I expect that it can ever be popular. People will be expecting a fine History because Brazil is a fine country, just as they thought the history of Leo X. must be splendid because he had a splendid court. I have begun with a sort of exordium very much to my own liking, in which they are told what they are to look for and what they will find. But it is in vain to tell them ; the public is a great ass that must have its ears tickled, or it will bray with disappointment in your face.”

In the same year, 1811, we find him writing : “ Kehama, I believe, is in the way of being tolerably well abused. . . . It is liked by all whom I wish to like it; and I agree with you so far as to believe it will be a long while before the world will see anything else as good. Longman told me a month ago he had disposed of 322 copies; 500 only were printed. This was the first sale, and there it is likely to stop. My name carries off anything to that amount; the after sale depends for some years upon what such coxcombs as Jeffrey may please to pronounce upon it.”

Southey’s state of mind as regards his critics may be seen in a letter of his, written in 1811, referring to a review of Jeffrey’s : " The piece of criticism in question is matchless for self - contradiction and rank rascality and envious malice. You know, Senhora, how I take these things — something as a Rhinoceros does a fleabite. When I go to Edinburgh, however, I shall no longer observe any of the courtesies of life towards Gog, but pass him in the street without looking down to receive his salutations, and speak of him just as such a coxcomb deserves to be spoken of. . . . Scott’s Review of Kehama in the Quarterly is very friendly, and the analysis of the story is given in the language of a poet; but he has in one or two instances missed the connecting points of the story, and fancies an incongruity where there is none. The skill with which the fable is constructed is what I most pride myself upon.”

The “ Lake Poets,” though presenting a united defense against the criticism of the reviewers, were conscious enough of one another’s failings; Southey, at any rate, dwells on them freely in his letters. Coleridge is often mentioned, and we see the barrier rising between the two men. Thus in 1804 Southey writes from Greta Hall, Keswick, where Coleridge and he had a joint household: “ Coleridge and I are the best companions possible in almost all moods of mind — for all kinds of wisdom and all kinds of nonsense.” In 1806, however, he writes: “ Coleridge is at last arrived [from Malta and Italy], little improved in health of body, and not at all so in health of mind. He is grown very fat — which he attributes to disease, and his wife believes it. The fact is that he is always eating and drinking — morning, noon, and midnight — hardly ever without rum and water beside him, sugared to the utmost ; and if he is not talking, he must be eating — his mouth seems incapable of being at rest. If he does not sleep at night, up he gets for cold meat and spirits and water. If all this does not kill a man, it must needs fatten him.

. . . He came on Thursday last. A heap of letters which awaited him lies still unopened upon his table — increasing every day. He has begun to teach the two boys Greek ! and I think it very possible that he may go on with them three days more. As you may suppose he is very entertaining, but whether it be that he is really worsened, or that after so long an absence the thing becomes more striking, I never saw a human countenance express such intense and loathsome arrogance of self-admiration. It is at times quite fiendish. His humour is now to be orthodox, because he has made out some metaphysical arguments for the Trinity. In short, I feel more than ever admiration and astonishment at his intellect, and more than ever grief and indignation at all that it is coupled with.”

Again in 1807 Southey writes : “ Coleridge, as you remark, has been in Italy, and, by way of showing it, he made a point of always addressing Anne by the name of Anna; saying it was not affectation, but he had been so long accustomed to speak Italian that he could not help using the a. ... I should, however, have thought more of his judgment in pictures if I had not known that before he went abroad he had no love of them and pretended to none, and if I had not heard him speak of Duppa’s heads in terms which, even before me, were unwarrantably strong, and, when I was not in the room, became in the highest degree contemptuous and abusive. There are few men with whom I have so many intellectual points of contact as with C., and none with whom all my habits, feelings, morals, and affections are in more direct and almost hostile contrariety. We are so utterly opposite on all the outward and visible signs of man, and in the inward and spiritual grace as well, that, in my conscience, I do not believe any person whom we both know likes the one without at the same time not liking, or positively disliking, the other. We are North and South, and if the needle of any one’s affections points to the one it must necessarily turn tail to the other. Strange for the two men who have been so closely connected by their opinions, and who at this time more nearly agree in opinion upon all subjects with each other than they do with anybody else, saving upon the subject of divorce and the Trinity. The former he defends because it gives him an opportunity of letting people know he is unhappily married, as Milton was before him, and the latter he affects to believe for the sake of making people wonder and exhibiting the wonderful acuteness of his mind, which loves to make even absurdities appear reasonable.”

In 1810, referring to The Friend, Southey writes : “ It is not a little extraordinary that Coleridge, who is proud of logic, and who has an actual love and passion for close, hard thinking, should write in so rambling and inconclusive a manner; while I, who am utterly incapable of that toil of thought in which he delights, never fail to express myself perspicuously and to the point. I owe perhaps something of this to the circumstance of having lived with him during that year in my life which was most likely to give my mind its lasting character. Disliking his inordinate love of talking, I was naturally led to avoid the same fault. When we were alone, and he talked his best (which was always at these times), I was pleased to listen ; and when we were in company, and I heard the same thing repeated to every fresh company, seven times in the week if we were in seven parties, still I was silent — in great measure from depression of spirits at perceiving those vices in his nature which soon appeared to be incurable. When he provoked me into an argument I made the most of my time ; and, as it was not easy to get in more than a few words, took care to make up in weight for what they wanted in measure. His habits have continued, and so have mine.”

Again Southey writes: “ Coleridge has gone to London to put himself under Carlisle to be cured of his evil habits, a disease of which nothing but absolute coercion could cure him. I suppose he is going on just as usual, and consider the vice incurable. A dismal thing; the soreness of the sorrow has been past with me for many years, but the sense of the loss which it is to mankind increases.”

In 1808 he writes: “ Coleridge is now settled at Grasmere, and the boys are going to school at Ambleside. He has been over here twice — the last time while we were at Netherhall: then he was in villainous humour, and there was a good deal of cat and dogging going on. ... I do not expect to see much of him.”

The references to Landor are of a very different nature, as may be seen from the following extracts, June 22, 1803: " That volume of Geberish Poetry I bought as soon as published. It is much worse than Gebir — that is far more understandable. Landor and I as Poets are each other’s antipodes. He strives to muffle up his meaning in the most obscure metaphysical language. I wish to give mine stark naked. I will swear, and I can prove out of my Homer and my Bible and my old ballads and Romances, that the finest passages in poetry are always and uniformly so plain and perspicuous that you catch their full force and meaning immediately ; the worst nuts have the hardest shells. A horse-chestnut has a hedgehog case that puzzles the pigs; but nectarines and strawberries dissolve on the lip. Landor is a man of great genius ; he is strong, but it is an unwieldy strength. Verse painting is his talent; he makes me see, but he never makes me feel; and he is always trying to make me think, and often makes very shallow water look deep by muddying it.”

Southey would seem to have taken the expression “ Geberish Poetry ” from Lamb ; for in 1799 Lamb, in a letter to Southey, writes : “ I have seen Gebor — Gebor aptly so denominated from Geborish quasi Giberish. But Gebor hath some lucid intervals.”

It was on his second voyage to Lisbon, in 1800, that Southey took with him a poem with “ miraculous beauties called Gebir, written by God knows who.” The volume mentioned in the above letter is one entitled Poetry, published by Landor anonymously in 1802.

His first meeting with Landor, “ the only man,” he wrote, “ of whose praise I was ambitious or whose censure would have humbled me,” was not till 1808. When his mind began to fail him, it is said he more often held Gebir in his hands than any other volume of poetry. “ It is very seldom now,” writes Caroline Southey, his second wife, “ that he ever names any person ; but this morning, before he left his bed, I heard him repeating softly to himself, ‘ Landor, ay Landor.’ ” The friendship and admiration were mutual. Emerson wrote, after visiting Landor at Fiesole, in 1833 : “ Landor pestered me with Southey ; but who is Southey ? ” On August 14,1808, Southey writes : “ Landor is gone to Spain to fight as a common soldier in the Spanish Army. I thought he would go. A noble-hearted man, brimful of ardour and genius and the love of liberty.” He writes of him in 1811: “ Senhora, I long for you to see that man, who wants only my steadiness to have been the first man of the age. There is more of the thunder and lightning of genius about him than I ever saw in any other human being.”

February 13, 1812. “ Landor has just published [a tragedy] without his name, which, tho’ it has little common dramatic interest, and partakes of that obscurity which distinguishes all his verse, is yet a most wonderful production, and has passages in it of exquisite beauty and of insurpassable sublimity. Count Julian is the title. The same characters as those of Pelayo, but very differently represented.”

Of Wordsworth Southey writes in 1808 : “ He has written a masterly poem called The White Doe of Rilston Hall, or The Fate of the Nortons. The poem is . . . incomparably fine. It would amuse you to hear how he talks of his own production — his entire and intense selfishness exceeds anything you could have conceived. I am more amused at it than offended ; not being sufficiently attached to him to feel pain at perceiving his faults, and yet respecting him far too much on the average of his qualities to be disgusted. It is so pure and unmixed a passion in him that Ben Jonson would have had him in a play, had he been his contemporary.”

In 1811 he wrote the following passage : “ Between ourselves, Senhora, the writer [in The Annual Register] is right enough in placing me upon an equality with two of my contemporaries, but he had not sense enough to find them out. They are Wordsworth and Landor. Coleridge might have been added, if he pleased. Scott has that sort of talent in narrative poetry which The Castle Spectre exhibits in the drama — the power of conceiving fine stage situations. This is his excellence, and if any person chooses to think that in this he excels me I shall not object to the decision. Upon no other point, I humbly conceive, can there be any comparison between us. Campbell is the mere creature of party criticism, whose verses one and all are tinsel and trumpery.”

In 1812 Southey received a visit from Shelley, and he describes the “ young couple ” (Shelley and his first wife, Harriet) : “The husband nineteen ; . . . lately expelled from Oxford for printing a treatise in six pages called The Necessity of Atheism, and sending it round to all the Bishops, requesting them to convince him of his error, if in error he was. Oh, how you would like this heir to six thousand a year, who now that he is got to the Pantheistic stage of his progress is the very ghost of what I was at his age, poet and philosopher and Jacobin and moralist and enthusiast! Chance has brought him to this place, and he is likely to get more good here than the whole bench of Bishops could have done him. A D. D. [Doctor of Divinity] to whom he sent one of the circulars with this taking title recommended prayer to him as the way to settle his doubts, and he prayed for two months. His own heart will lead him right at last; and for all the vagaries of the way — why, Senhora, you would say as I do, and as King Henry did of that son of his whose head was like unto a bull, his nose unto a boar — ‘ no matter for that; I like him the better therefore.’ ”

A week later he writes : “ The Shelleys are going to Ireland, where he imagines he shall tame the wild Irish — about as good a scheme as that of Atheisticating the bench of Bishops. He had better have remained here, where he would have learnt more in a few months from my experience than his own can possibly teach him in as many years. I am sorry he is going, for he interested me much.”

Southey well foresaw the future of Hartley Coleridge. In 1812 he writes : “ Hartley is grown a great fellow, all beard and eyes, as odd and as extraordinary as ever he was, with very good dispositions, but with ways and tendencies which will neither be to his own happiness nor to the comfort of anybody connected with him. . . . Hartley is of such unmalleable materials that what he may make of himself God knows, but I suspect nobody will be able to mould or manage him.”

And again, on Christmas Day, 1826, Southey writes: “ Mrs. C. is in great trouble about Hartley’s conduct, who is treading in his father’s steps, and acting in a way which a Jesuit would try to correct by holy water and the sign of the cross, and which could be cured by the treading-mill or the whipping-post, but it is a case upon which moral applications are wasted.”

There is a charming mention of the Dutch poet Bilderdyk and his small household at Leyden, where Southey was tended in 1815, in a state of great suffering, owing to an inflamed foot. He writes : “ If I had not fallen into good hands, or into these hands a day or two later, the consequences might have been very serious. I accepted the warmly offered hospitality of Mr. Bilderdyk and his wife (the translatress of Roderick), and remained twelve days on the sofa. . . . They were some of the pleasantest days in my life, for a more interesting and extraordinary person than Bilderdyk it has never been my fortune to fall in with, nor indeed a family in which there was more to admire and love. It consists only of himself, now more than seventy years of age; his wife, twenty - four years younger ; and one boy of thirteen, the only surviving child of seven by a former marriage and eight by this. . . . He is as unpopular in his own country as I am among the Whigs and Radicals of England ; his enemies, however, are obliged to acknowledge that as a poet and a man of learning he stands, and always has stood, far above all his contemporaries. His life has been mixed up with the political events of Holland ; he, like his ancestors before him, having been faithfully attached to the House of Orange. Revolutions have robbed him of everything, and he has only a small pension granted by an ungrateful Government, which promotes its old enemies and neglects its old friends. But he has not lost anything of his youthful heart and mind — at least I see no symptom of decay in either. ... It would be a rich evening entertainment to tell you what I cannot say in a hasty letter, concerning these excellent people, with whom I was presently familiarized as well as domesticated ; B. delighting to find a person who agreed with him entirely in all main points, and could follow him in all his excursive pursuits, and Mrs. B. not less pleased in tracing resemblance in my person to what his had been. I learnt from their conversation more than any other opportunities could have taught me concerning Holland, and saw — which no traveller can see in Hotels — the Dutch manner of life. You remember, Senhora, how I used to talk of the Vrouwes : the one upon whose humanity I was thrown has more than answered all the expectation I could ever have formed.”

Here is an interesting criticism on Richardson, written in 1812 : “ It is many years, two or three and twenty, I believe, since I read that book [Clarissa], but my remembrance of it is distinct and strong — good proof of the power with which it is written. My own opinion of Richardson is, that for a man of decorous life he had a most impure imagination, and that the immorality of our old drama is far less mischievous than his moral stories of Pamela and Squire Booby (how I like Fielding for making out that name!) and of Clarissa.”

The political events of the time are constantly alluded to in these letters, and we can see how early Southey despaired of any good coming from France, which, he wrote, has “ played the traitor with liberty.” He abandoned the dream of his early hopes, founded on the first events of the French Revolution, when he proposed with Coleridge and Lovell to set up their Pantisocratic scheme on the banks of the Susquehanna. The following passage from a letter of the year 1803 seems to rise to “ something like prophetic strain : ” “ The war in which we are so unavoidably involved by the credulity of honest English Ministers and the rascally insolence of your countryman Mr. Parker will grievously molest me. Portugal will in all probability be attacked — and it is said that this country will leave it to its fate. I know not whether wisely or not, for I think 30,000 English could defend that country against any force which the French could bring against it. The Portuguese peasantry want neither patriotism nor courage, but you know what the officers are ! We shall see a great uproar in the world. I learn that in case of the conquest of Portugal by France, Spanish America and Brazil will be revolutionized by England, so strangely have things turned about! England is actually fighting for liberty against French usurpation! ”

His visits to Portugal and Spain, and knowledge of their history and literature, made him enthusiastic over their struggle with Napoleon. Thus in 1808 we find: “ My blood swells when I think of Spain ; often have I said that if Europe is to be delivered in our days, it is in Spain that her deliverance will begin.” The Convention of Cintra (1808) throws him into a fury; and his denunciation of the Duke of Wellington—then Sir Arthur Wellesley—for his share in it sounds strangely when read by the light of after events: “As for Sir Arthur and Sir Hew — for the first time in my life I was so irritated by public news as to pass a sleepless night in consequence. There is a straight and easy way of proceeding in such a case, which is to break the convention and shoot those who made it; or else, after the manner of the Romans, deliver them up to the enemy with ropes about their necks. Sir Arthur ought to be shot for fighting when he did; he was afraid of being superseded before he won a battle, and for that reason fought with only half his own force — for fear, if he had waited till the other half came up, Sir Hew should land and take the command. Sir Hew — Lady Hew I ought rather to say, for the creature has long been known to be an old woman — then suffered Junot to fall back about thirty miles after the battle, and during the negotiation ; and so between them they have sacrificed the honour of England and the interest of Spain. But the root of all evil lies in the Duke of York, who appointed such wretches. It is a comfort that the general opinion is so openly and loudly expressed; and I hope and trust an example will be made of the commander. My own opinion is that no man could possibly consent to let Junot carry off his plunder unless he had been promised a share of it for so doing. This will be laughed at and generally scouted ; but the man who could subscribe such a convention is capable of any degree of baseness ; and there are but two possible motives for his conduct — cowardice or corruption : the former with a victorious and superior army seems to be out of the question ; and for the latter, I am afraid, Senhora, that they who sell their votes at home would not have much scruple at selling their country abroad.”

Sir Hew Dalrymple joined the English army in Portugal, as commander in chief, on August 22, 1808, the day after Sir Arthur Wellesley’s victory at Vimeiro. He superseded Sir Harry Burrard, who had, in his turn, superseded Wellesley. Within thirty hours there were three successive commanders in chief. The government, in view of the popular outcry against the convention, ordered a Court of Inquiry, the three generals being recalled to attend it. They were acquitted of blame. Napoleon better understood the advantage gained to England by the convention. “ I was,” he said, “ about to send Junot to a council of war, but the English got the start of me by sending their generals to one.”

Of Bonaparte Southey writes in 1809 : “ Yet, Senhora, by the living God, an able minister might in six months’ time hang up Bonaparte for the Spanish crows to feed upon, and reduce France within her ancient limits, by sending our whole military force into Spain. No man who knows what the French are, what the Spaniards are, and what the English are, can doubt this. Now is the time to put out this fire which has ravaged Europe, now when we can fairly get at it. Yet when we should be playing all our engines upon it, we do nothing more than send the maids to empty their chamber pots there. On such an occasion as this England might spare 150,000 men, for it is as much our own cause as if it were upon our own ground. I would land 100,000 of them behind Bonaparte, seize the passes and shut him in Spain, and send the rest to fight him there.”

Here is another passage pouring forth his contempt on Ministers and Opposition alike : “ It is not unlikely that great political changes will soon take place. The Grenvilles and the Foxites must separate upon the question of peace ; and as the people of England are not so mad as to join with the Foxites in their frantic wish for what would be little short of an act of national suicide, even the Grenvilles may acquire some popularity from the ground on which they stand, and Canning would be right glad to get them in, and rid himself by their help of some of his wretched colleagues. This change is very likely to take place. I wish it may, because Wynn makes an excellent franker of large packets when he gets at Whitehall. Of any other benefit either to myself or to the nation I have little hope and no expectation.”

Throughout these letters we mark the strange union of a love of liberty and a love of order; though, as the years pass, the element of order grows stronger, while the faith in liberty becomes more and more a belief in a mere freedom of thought, with indifference, or even hostility, to those who desired freedom of action. On Christmas Day, 1826, Southey can write, “ The two plagues of Europe at this time are the Spirit of priestcraft and the Spirit of revolution.” This, as we go through the series of letters, would seem to sum up the abiding opinion to which he can be seen approaching. In 1808 he was writing, “ I who am both Whig and Dissenter ; ” while in a letter of the succeeding year we read : Mr. Walhouse and I, Senhora, do not agree in opinion respecting Petition to the Crown upon great public occasions. It is the legal, orderly, and proper manner in which the People are by the Bill of Rights entitled to express their feelings, and it is their means of protesting against any measure which may be oppressive to them, or injurious to the honour and interests of the country. I believe it will now be admitted by most men that the Convention of Cintra was deeply injurious both to its honour and interests, and the King has seldom been worse advised than when he made that most unmerited and unconstitutional answer to the City of London.”

But in 1812 we find him writing on Parliamentary Reform : “ There is an attack upon the Burdettite Reformers, written with as much force as anything which I have ever yet produced ; for you must know that I am become a great enemy to what is called Parliamentary Reform. It is a vile two-penny halfpenny business, holding out nothing but a deceitful economy, and substituting Profit and Loss in the place of everything which has hitherto been considered as great and generous.”

In a letter written in 1826 we have Southey, the “ Whig and Dissenter ” of 1808, appearing as the defender of the Church Establishment: “ Lord R.’s desire [in electing Southey to Parliament] was that I should have an opportunity of defending the Church Establishment. I can perform that duty far better at this desk ; and, by God’s blessing, I will perform it, heartily and strenuously. I have begun a second volume of Vindiciæ. These books will live after me, and, I confidently believe, will do more against that abominable system of imposture than has been done against it by the pen since the — Reformation.”

We may compare this with the passage already quoted, where Southey marks the Trinity as one of the two subjects alone on which Coleridge and he disagree. This Coleridge “ affects to believe for the sake of exhibiting the wonderful acuteness of his mind.”

As reference has been made to Southey’s election to Parliament through the influence of Lord Radnor, we quote a passage in a letter of 1826, setting out the story of this strange episode in his life : “ The story of my election is from first to last sufficiently curious. A very odd person (Lord R.) thought he was making the best use of his influence by giving me a seat in Parliament : it is an influence which has cost him very dear, and which he makes it a point of conscience to exercise as it ought to be exercised. In this case he happened to hit upon as odd a man as himself, and is therefore at the same time disappointed and pleased at the result. As for a qualification, he would have furnished such a title as is usually [given ?] on such occasions; but no possible inducements could have persuaded me to enter into public life, and I chose to let this be known by the manner in which I got out of the seat. I have never seen him nor had any direct communication with him, unless an anonymous letter can be called so, in which he informed me of my return. The affair served for a nine days’ wonder : it made my letters pass free for five months, and there it ends.” The " qualification ” for a seat in Parliament at this time was the possession of a landed estate of three hundred pounds a year. That he was thus qualified every member, on taking his seat, was required to state on oath. The law was, however, notoriously evaded by a fictitious transference of property.

With this letter, written at the end of 1826, the correspondence seems to have ended. Mary Barker apparently settles in France, marries, and fades out of his life. With Southey “ the better days of life ” are past; the shadows grow deeper. “ My happiness,” he writes, “ has been in my family, and there only was I vulnerable ; nothing that has assailed my character or affected my worldly fortune ever gave me an hour’s vexation or deprived me of an hour’s rest.” It was the sorrows that darkened his home which gradually broke his courageous and elastic spirit. His grief for the loss of his firstborn, his daughter Margaret, yielded to time. After the still greater sorrow, overwhelming at the time, which he endured on the death of his son Herbert, in 1816, he could himself write, “ I am not unhappy.” Yet no man who bears himself toward the dead as Southey did can long escape the penalty which such self-suppression exacts. Their names were never mentioned ; even in letters he could hardly bring himself to allude directly to his lost ones. When Carlyle met Southey in London, in 1836-37, he was struck by his extreme sensitiveness. “ How,” he asked himself, “ has this man contrived, with such a nervous system, to keep alive for nearly sixty years ? ” The true answer would have been in the words of Southey’s own oft-quoted motto, “ In labore quies.” The day of payment came when irremediable grief fell on him, and the sensitive spirit was worn out by past sorrows, unexpressed and self-consumed. Toward the close of 1826, about the time he wrote the last letter which we have before us to Mary Barker, his daughter Isabel, “ the most radiant Creature that I ever beheld or shall behold,” passed away. From his wife he was soon parted “ by something worse than death,” — a lost mind. She lingered on to 1835, faithfully tended by her husband, who long refused to suffer her out of his charge. His remaining children, for happier causes, left him, and Greta Hall grew silent. He still worked hard, and at good work, too, as the Life of Cowper shows. Rays of cheerfulness still survive in his letters, and may be seen in The Doctor, — a book “ the wit and humor of which,” as Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “ have seldom been equaled,” — wherein is to be found an addition to the classics of the nursery in The Tale of the Three Bears. While Coleridge sits on the brow of Highgate Hill, conversing on “ Om-m-mject ” and " Sum-m-mject ” with his solemn “ shake or quaver,” detached like an Epicurean god from all earthly troubles, Southey, who among other burdens had supported Coleridge’s family, wages a brave warfare, doing good work and ministering to his poor wife, " with a morality,” as Carlyle writes, “ that shone distinguished among his contemporaries.” After the death of his wife Edith, in 1835, he lived eight years, little by little losing his spirits and his powers. In 1839 he married his old friend and correspondent, Caroline Bowles, who watched over him tenderly in his declining days. Memory went, and in his library he could do little more than gain pleasure by merely touching his cherished volumes. When Wordsworth went over to Greta Hall in 1840, Southey failed to recognize him till he was told who it was. In 1843 the end came, and his spirit departed, worn away by the troubles which for many a year he had steadfastly borne, amid silent work, in cheerfulness and the service of those he loved. Sara Coleridge, to whom for long years at Greta Hall he had been as a father, could well write of him, “ The best man I have ever known.”

Harold Spencer Scott.