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 both fool and knave.

The grossness of this utter defiance of candour and con sistency 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 reflexions of those who suffer for being otherwise. But let us never forget to separate an honest and 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. Nothing remains the same but their vanity.

To conclude, before Mr. Southey accepted those meaner laurels which Apollo, in the succeeding lines, has so much reason to disdain, 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 latterly he seems every day to have been growing more and more contented with all sorts of trucklings,-trucklings to court, trucklings to common-places, trucklings to the writer's trade.

Of all the Lake poets,—those, at least, who have obtained any eminence, he is unquestionably the tritest in every respect. 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

G

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.

For the more complacent opinion formerly held of Mr. Southey's general character, Apollo, I am afraid, is not so easily to be defended as myself, inasmuch as a want of foresight is 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

goodness to show for me.

By the way, speaking of Mr. Southey's court laurels, of which I have luckily said enough in another publication, people have not forgotten what he said formerly of "the degraded title of epic," and of his objections to write accordingly under such degradation. How is it, that he has not expressed a similar horror at the degraded title of Poet Laureat? He cannot pretend to say that it is not so, for setting aside the remaining reasons, one of the very persons who helped to degrade the one, contributed to do as much for the other. Would it not be better in some future edition of his works, to alter that word "degraded" into some more convenient epithet, such as worthless for instance, that is to say, valueless,-pennyless, something that does not give one a pension?

16 For Coleridge had vex'd him long since, I suppose, By his idling, and gabbling, and muddling in prose ;

Mr. Coleridge is a man of great natural talents, as they who most lament his waste of them, are the readiest to

acknowledge. Indeed it is their conviction in this respect, which induces them to feel the waste as they do; and if Apollo shows him no quarter, it is evidently because he looks upon him as a deserter. Of his poetical defects enough will be said in speaking of those of Mr. Wordsworth; and if as much cannot be said of his kindred beauties, it is rather perhaps because he has written less and is a man of less industry, than because he does not equal the latter in genius. The allusion in the text is to his strange periodical publication, called The Friend.'See Note 18.

There was an idle report, it seems, on the first appearance of Mr. Coleridge's tragedy, that I was the instigator of a party to condemn it. The play, as it happened, was not condemned, nor does any such party appear to have existed; the criticism also, which was written upon it in the Examiner, by a friend, must have removed, I should think, all doubts on that head. It is very certain, that at the time of its appearance I was too ill to be out of doors, nor is it less so, that regarding myself as a reporter of the public judgment in these matters, I never thought myself justified in being a party on either side