tion. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads, in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

With this view I wrote "The Ancient Mariner," and was preparing among other poems, "The Dark Ladie," and the "Christabel," in which I should have more nearly realised my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and

sustained diction, which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the Lyrical Ballads were published; and were presented by him as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life, as to produce the pleasurable interest, which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of speech that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions with which the controversy has been conducted by the assailants.

Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which they were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them, they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found, too, not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervour. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round and round.

(From the Same.)

ROBERT SOUTHEY

[Robert Southey was born in 1774 at Bristol, where his father was an unsuccessful linen draper. A maiden, aunt, with whom he spent most of the days of his childhood, gave him an early bias to reading, and fed his imagination with stage plays, so that when he was sent to Westminster School, at the age of fourteen, his mind was already furnished with a quantity of miscellaneous knowledge, he had written a considerable quantity of verse, and had arrived at the conclusion that it was his mission to be an epic poet. Westminster gave him little-so at least he thought-but the friendship of C. W. W. Wynn, afterwards his indefatigable benefactor, and Grosvenor Bedford, who was his confidential friend for life. Southey wrote much for school magazines; at last an ironical article on flogging led to his private expulsion. Christ Church, Oxford, closed its doors against him, but Balliol received the youth who, as he says himself, "left Westminster in a perilous state-a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by Gibbon." At Oxford he gained some notoriety by the profession of Republicanism, but apparently found no profit in the studies of the place, beyond learning to know Epictetus. He had not left the University when the fall of the Girondins, and the consequent horrors in Paris during 1793, wrecked the faith of the young Oxford Jacobin in the French Revolution. Coleridge came upon him thus robbed of his ideal, whispered "Pantisocracy" in his ear, and persuaded him to join a colony of equals— each provided with a mild and lovely woman-in America. The scheme fell through, but Southey married his chosen mild and lovely woman, Edith Fricker, while Coleridge paired off with her sister Sarah. Before choosing a profession, Southey went for a six months' visit to his uncle Hill, who was chaplain to the British Factory at Lisbon, and was attracted at once by the literature of the Peninsula, to which he gave the best part of his life. Returning home, he found that there could be no profession for him but that of letters, and at the age of twenty-two was looking out for a permanent home in which to write. He was long in finding one. He spent six years between various habitations at home and on the Continent, writing epic poems and ballads the latter at a guinea a week-for the Morning Post. At last, in 1803, he settled down in Greta Hall, Keswick, to a life of constant literary toil. Coleridge, who at first shared housekeeping with him, soon wandered off, and Southey was left for some time in charge of Mrs. Coleridge and her children, and of his wife's other sister, Mrs. Lovell. From Greta Hall proceeded the majority of Southey's well-nigh forgotten epics, and his most important prose works. He had enjoyed a civil list pension of £160 since 1807, up to which time his friend Wynn had allowed him a like sum out of

his own pocket. In 1813 the Laureateship brought an addition of £90 a year to his income, and twenty-two years later Peel, on his declining a baronetcy, bestowed on him another pension of £300 a year. It was really on the Quarterly Review, however, that Southey lived from 1809 onwards. Writing for every number, he sometimes received as much as 100 for an article. This and other hack work gave him the time and opportunity to produce much solid and ineffectual literature which did not pay him, and has sunk into oblivion with the designedly ephemeral matter to which he grudged the labour that might have been bestowed on his History of Portugal. Southey's mind gave way before his death, which took place in 1843.]

SOUTHEY is the stock example-though not necessarily the model of a man of letters. He lived by and for literature. Coleridge styled Southey's library his wife, and no spouse could desire greater tenderness or more steadfast devotion than he bestowed upon the books which covered the walls of almost every room in Greta Hall. He was a bibliophile in the widest sense of the word. Books that were worthy of fine binding he clothed handsomely; others were sometimes decently and sometimes gaily covered by his women folks, and made of one room a "Cottonian library." But he was never so much of a lover of tall folios as Lamb, though, in his decadence, Wordsworth found him fondly handling the volumes he could no longer read. Books were in truth to Southey the raw material in which he exercised what can only be termed his book-making faculties. He bought as many as he could pay for, and as fast. Some were chosen to feed his intellect and please his palate; but most were destined to be delved into as rapidly as possible and forced to give up their treasures of information, which were classified, indexed, and shaped for use in the production of history, biography, or Quarterly article. A sentence in a letter to his son-in-law sums up Southey's conception of the art of literature. "As for composition," he says, "it has no difficulties for one who will 'read, learn, mark, and inwardly digest,' the materials on which he is to work." Here we have his own estimate both of his style and of the genre of his work, and it is a fair one. He made books out of other books, and took no thought of the manner of writing save to put down the results of collation in the simplest mode that occurred to him. He is one of our classic prose writers. Yet he never sought the perfection which Byron (no friendly critic) allowed him to have attained. "Of what is called style, not a thought enters my head at any time," he confessed; he "only endeavoured to write plain English,

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and to put my thoughts in language which every one understand." No one, indeed, has ever affected to discover individuality in Southey's prose, or has assigned to him epochmaking importance in any of the departments of letters he cultivated so assiduously. His style has been, and still is, considered "perfect," because it suits to perfection the use to which it is deliberately put.

The purely bookish life which Southey led affected, in De Quincey's opinion, his conversational manner. When engaged in controversial talk, he was apt to use a sententious, epigrammatic form of speech, not for the object of winning applause for brilliance, but so that he might meet the demand upon his opinions at the slightest cost of thought and time, and get back with the least possible delay to his books. The habits of a literary recluse did not affect his style of composition to the same extent. But solitary thinking and the trick of getting rid of discussion when it came his way by means of an epigram, largely influenced the character of his work, and for the worse. He is a striking proof of the fallacy that detachment from the world gives of necessity a true perspective. The Southey of Keswick was in temperament the Southey of the Pantisocracy. As he never lost the buoyancy of youth-the half-physical necessity to energise in some way or other-so he never overcame the defects of the early shaping given to his mind. His imagination was developed too soon and too rapidly. He never became a deep or even a fairly broad thinker. In his day he found no new political truth. He collected facts industriously, grouped them artistically, and told his story perspicuously. But he could not grasp the significance of an epoch or an incident, and he measured action by no standard but his own moral taste. Macaulay scarcely exaggerated when he said that Southey's success almost always had an inverse proportion to the degree in which his undertakings required a logical head. If, as Mr. Dowden happily puts it, "History as written by Southey is narrative rendered spiritual by moral ardour," we cannot accept sympathy, even though its leanings are admirable, as a substitute for the show of right reason that is essential to the unifying of a chapter or volume of events. But it was the want of a sense of proportion that had the chief share in rendering Southey a historian manqué. His early visit to Lisbon gave him an interest in the Iberian peoples; he conceived and preserved through