publickly exposes his mind to be anatomised while he is living. He lays open his character to the scalping knife, guides the philosophic hand in its painful researches, and on the bald crown of our petit tondu, in vain concealed under withered bay-leaves and a few contemptible grey hairs, you see the organ of vanity triumphant-sleek,— smooth, round, perfect, polished, horned and shining, as it were in a transparency. This is the handle of his intellect, the index of his mind; 'the guide, the anchor of his purest thoughts, and soul of all his moral being;' the clue to the labyrinth of all his tergiversations and contradictions; the medius terminus of his political logic." The "concluding thunderclap," and the sentence “like a whale's back in the sea of prose," are as follows: "In advocating the cause of the French people, Mr. Southey's principles and his interest were at variance, and therefore he quitted his principles when he saw a good opportunity: in taking up the cause of the Allies, his principles and his interest became united and thenceforth indissoluble. His engagement to his first love, the Republic, was only upon liking; his marriage to Legitimacy is for better, for worse, and nothing but death shall part them. Our simple Laureate was sharp upon his hoyden Jacobin mistress, who brought him no dowry, neither place nor pension, who 'found him poor and kept him so,' by her prudish notions of virtue. He divorced her, in short, for nothing but the spirit and success with which she resisted the fraud and force to which the old bawd Legitimacy was for ever resorting to overpower her resolution and fidelity. He said she was a virago, a cunning gipsey, always in broils about her honour and the inviolability of her person, and always getting the better in them, furiously scratching the face or cruelly tearing off the hair of the said pimping old lady, who would never let her alone, night or day. But since her foot slipped one day on the ice, and the detestable old hag tripped up her heels, and gave her up to the kind keeping of the Allied Sovereigns, Mr. Southey has devoted himself to her more fortunate and wealthy rival: he is become uxorious in his second matrimonial connection; and though his false Duessa has turned out a very witch, a foul, ugly witch, a murderess, a sorceress, perjured, and a harlot, drunk with insolence, mad with power, a griping rapacious wretch, bloody, luxurious, wanton, malicious, not sparing steel, or poison, or gold, to gain her endsbringing famine, pestilence, and death in her train-infecting the air with her thoughts, killing the beholders with her looks, claiming mankind as her property, and using them as her slaves-driving every thing before her, and playing the devil wherever she comes, Mr. Southey sticks to her in spite of every thing, and for very shame lays his head in her lap, paddles with the palms of her hands, inhales her hateful breath, leers in her eyes and whispers in her ears, calls her little fondling names, Religion, Morality, and Social Order, takes for his motto, 'Be to her faults a little blind, sticks close to his filthy bargain, and will not give her up, because she keeps him, and he is down in her will. Faugh! 'What's here? Gold! yellow, glittering, precious gold! -The wappened widow, Whom the spittle-house and ulcerous sores Would heave the gorge at, this embalms and spices To the April day again.' The above passage is, we fear, written in the style of Aretin, which Mr. Southey condemns in the Quarterly. It is at least a very sincere style: Mr. Southey will never write so, till he can keep in the same mind for three and twenty years together. Why should not one make a sentence of a page long, out of the feelings of one's whole life? The early Protestant Divines wrote such prodigious long sentences from the sincerity of their religious and political opinions. Mr. Coleridge ought not to imitate them." Truly there was enough of biting invective here to have enabled Hazlitt to dispense with the grim personality about the grey hairs! Haydon's "remarks on the manuscript" to which Keats also alludes at page 65 are the views put forward by the painter in a letter on the subject of a book which made a great stir at the time,-Manuscrit Venu de St. Helène. It is not a favourable example of Haydon's contributions to The Examiner. The conclusion is as follows: "Never was a little book so interesting! never was such a laying open of characters, events, and circumstances, mutually acting on each other!-never were words so pregnant with meaning, or the mightiest events so concisely expressed!-never were political errors so courageously acknowledged, or the deepest crimes so sophistically glossed. It can only proceed from a mind long used to such conclusions. And if it be not by Napoleon, it is from an intellect of similar construction. B. R. H." III. POEM "BY ONE BEAUTIFUL MRS. PHILIPS" ("THE MATCHLESS ORINDA") TO MRS. M[ARY] A[WBREY] AT PARTING. I. I HAVE examin'd and do find, Of all that favour me There's none I grieve to leave behind But only, only thee. To part with thee I needs must die, 2. But neither Chance nor Complement 'Twas sacred sympathy was lent Us from the Quire above. That Friendship Fortune did create, Still fears a wound from Time or Fate. This is the poem transcribed by Keats for Reynolds in the letter written from Oxford in September 1817 (see page 75). I presume Bailey's copy of " the matchless Orinda's" works was the folio of 1669, with which I have collated the poem as given in Lord Houghton's Life, Letters &c. (1848) and have found no variations of consequence. 3. Our chang'd and mingled Souls are grown To such acquaintance now, That if each would resume their own, Alas! we know not how. We have each other so engrost, That each is in the Union lost. 4. And thus we can no Absence know, Nor shall we be confin'd; Our active Souls will daily go To learn each others mind. Nay, should we never meet to Sense, 5. Inspired with a Flame Divine I scorn to court a stay; For from that noble Soul of thine I ne're can be away. But I shall weep when thou dost grieve; Nor can I die whil'st thou dost live. 6. By my own temper I shall guess At thy felicity, And only like my happiness Because it pleaseth thee. Our hearts at any time will tell 7. All Honour sure I must pretend, All that is good or great; |