wisdom and caution of the nation which has modified what was defective from the beginning, and has resorted even to the silliest appendages of fictions, rather than make a radical change." 66 The only portion of the constitution which Southey cannot muster toryism enough to admire is the law. In that matter, he prays for reform." "He is a wise man, is Southey," said Thompson; "and a good man; in fact, the greatest man of the times, though not enough of a quack to be popular. He and Coleridge are men of equal strength, and the only superiority of the latter lay in his charlatanry. A clamour has been raised against him for the errors of his youth; as Bembus says, 'quod puer peccavit, accusant senem.' But Southey changed only as circumstances changed, perceiving that uniformity is not consistency. Erasmus in one of his epistles complains of a fate very similar to the Laureate's; rapiuntur in diversum omnia, etiam quæ optimo scribuntur animo; ne tempus quidem perpenditur, quo scripsit aliquis, sed quod suo tempore recte scribebatur, transferent in tempus incommodissimum.' The defamers of both of those great men should have remembered, that however they might have seemed to vary in position they were always true to the faith of their principles and always obedient to the law of their natures. And Self-contradiction is the only wrong; That acts in strict accordance with itself. In the feelings, the hopes and purposes which have presided over his life, there has been no turning; though he may have seen, as he advanced, a better mode of accomplishing what he desired, than when he set out. It is to his praise, that from his earliest youth, he has been the friend and defender of virtue. The advancement which Southey has given to literature has been mediate rather than direct; it lies in what he has directed and encouraged others to do more than in what he has done himself. 'Thalaba' was a bold and defiant ' declaration of independence' on all the critical princi ples, models, and canons, whose authority till then, had enslaved taste; it was an act like that flinging of the spear by the converted Saxon king into the sacred enclosures of Druidical superstition, which desecrated for ever the imputed holiness which was itself the false god that had enfettered men's minds. The dull deity of classical correctness was thenceforth unsceptred, and all were at liberty to adopt what license they pleased. Accordingly, it became the shield of Ajax, under cover of which Byron and Moore came upon the field." "The author, whose true character in these times it seems most difficult to settle," said Seward, "is Shelley. His imagination was inexhaustible, and his creative faculties boundlessly rich; but there was in him a total want of judgment. His works are, therefore, not so much poems as splendid storehouses of poetical materials; and to estimate the exact worth of such disordered wealth, has not been an easy task. Unfortunately for the speedy determination of his merits, his works are of a kind Quo neque procax vulgi penetrabit, atque longa What the mob canvass, they soon conclude; but that which is debated only by the learned, will long be doubtful. 'Citius inter horologia quam authores conveniet.' On the whole, I think that the reputation of Shelley has risen with time, and that Byron's has declined." "Of the latter point, in the sense in which you mean it, I am not so sure," said I. “The intense personal interest which the peer, his position and history excited, and which at first might not be easily distinguished from the admiration of the poet, has indeed subsided: but if his name is less often in the newspapers, his merits are more freely acknowledged by the critical. He now stands where nobility is no recommendation. 'A dead lord,' says Gray, 'ranks with a commoner.' In the literature of the past, as in the ninth place at whist, the honours are not courted. Byron's European fame is the best earnest of his immortality, for a foreign nation is a kind of contemporaneous posterity." "There is a cant," said Seward, " of extolling Byron for his deep acquaintance with life and his extensive experience of society. To my thinking, his misanthropy and anger against men denoted a want of thorough knowledge of the world and a partial and defective reasoning. There is a fine anecdote related by Goldsmith of Alexander VI., who on entering a town which he had captured, beheld a portion of the townsmen engaged in pulling down from a gibbet, a figure designed to represent himself, while another part were knocking down a neighbouring statue of one of the Orsini family with whom he was at war, in order to put his effigy, when taken down, in its place: Alexander, far from condemning the adulation of these barefaced flatterers, seemed pleased at their zeal,' and turning to Borgia, his son, only said with a smile, you see, my son, how small is the difference between a gibbet and a statue.' Scorn is the most ignorant and thoughtless form of disesteem; there is a patient tolerance that lies beyond contempt, and a placid love, born of pity, is a yet profounder phase of unregard. Shelley's apathetic carelessness of men showed that he despised them from his heart; and Wordsworth's diligent cheerfulness and systematic content, indicate a more thorough appreciation of the worthlessness of life than either of the others attained." 66 Byron and Shelley," said Mr. Thompson," were friends in life, and have often been classed together in literature; but they were in truth intellectual antipodes. The feeling on Byron's pages is all personal feeling; it is actual emotion, elevated and refined into the ideal. His sufferings suggested all his sentiments; and Experience was the parent of all his thoughts. Shelley's feelings were in his imagination, and he had no personality. It is the business of poetry to present to us the generalisations of ideal passions, and these are usually at tained by forgetting or merging the individual and the real, and sending the mind to wander through the fabrics of fancy; in this sense, it is justly affirmed, that Byron succeeded by the magnitude of his failure. He wrote true poetry without being a poet, he shaped into poetry its antagonism. The other was born a bard. Hence, if in respect of the mental qualities of the two men as geniuses, the question of greatness be made, we give the palm to Shelley; if in reference to their moral abilities as performers, we name Byron. In the first view, Shelley possessed more of the poetical faculty; in the second, it is Byron's praise, that in despite of the defect of those qualities, he wrote yet more splendid verses than the other. The first was an intellectual superiority, the last was a personal triumph; in the one you praise the mind, in the other, you applaud the man; in that you extol the gorgeous fancy, in this you reward the victorious will." 'Shelley's mind," said Seward, "seemed to be no portion of himself; his consciousness was apart from his conceptions. It is this which makes him often difficult to be understood, for usually it is through sympathy of temper that men attain to unity of thought. A flash of mutual feeling brightens a chain of notions otherwise dark and perplexing. The poet, lifted by passion to some airy seat, babbles of the golden forms pictured on the glassy bubbles which his fancy floats before him, and his words will be Pindaric to our sense unless we are placed in the same position by similarity of mood. Notions are but the expanded flower and foliage from the germ of feeling, and we must plant the latter in our heart, ere the atmosphere of our intelligence will be gladdened by the former. In truth, we never fully comprehend a poet's lines, unless we are beforehand in possession of the poet's meaning, and his words but remember us of our own images; in that case, he is explaining our own affections to us, and giving us in ideas what we previously possessed in impressions. It is the business, therefore, of the judicious poet, by addressing the heart to fling his feelings upon us before he expands his meaning, and thus to aqueduct the chasm between our consciousness and his thoughts. There is no trace of personal feeling from one end of Shelley's writings to the other. Compare, for illustration, his ode to the sky-lark with Wordsworth's on the same subject; the one is a record of individual emotions and a retrospect of spiritual experience, and breathes, throughout, the sadness of a pensive soul; the other displays an artificial and mechanical ingenuity, and, as exquisite as a Greek chorus, is as cold as a Greek statue. It is this same absence of conscience and want of moral impressibility which makes the atheism of Shelley so thorough and undoubting. Byron suffered so intensely from the stings of mental remorse, and laboured with such agony of effort to brighten the blackness of vice into that image of light and beauty for which his spirit was self-stung to struggle, that when he most earnestly chants the glories of sin, he is unwittingly offering his tribute to virtue. The convulsion of passion under which he laboured was wrought by his striving to maintain the erectness of his spirit amid the tyrannizing encroachments of the devastations of wickedness." "On the whole," said Mr. Thompson, "Byron has done great service to virtue, and will be regarded through all time as having made in that matter a great and conclusive experiment. Before his time, men, dwelling in the region of moderate decency, have handled and smelt and tasted the forms of seductive vice, and have asserted that there was much excellence in them, and that it might be a question whether it were not a safe game wholly to relinquish truth and its restraints, and to take up with vice for vice's sake. But Byron is the first man who has devoted his life and powers to the cultivation of flagitiousness, and has been determined to find and fix in depravity all his hopes and wishes and rewards. To this new scheme of happiness he dedicated himself wholly, and with all the ardour of desperation; he sounded passion to its depths, and raked the bottom of the gulf of sin; he explored, with the in |