Then she follows her master to the church-door, where stands a black horse upon which the devil flings her, leaping up in front.

And away like the lightning's speed they went,

And she was seen no more.

Southey wrote a parody of this tale entitled "The Surgeon's Warning," and a strange story it is. A "Resurrection Man," when he is dying, is terribly afraid that since he has rifled so many dead men's graves he will never have rest in his own, so he entreats his friends to bury him in lead and in a patent coffin

If they carry me off in the patent coffin,
Their labor will be in vain;

Let the undertaker see it bought of the maker,
Who lives by St. Martin's Lane;

which was done accordingly, and how it came to pass that in spite of this precaution the surgeon's bones were not allowed to rest in peace, is told with minute and unsavory particularity.

The story of Hatto and the rats, so admirably sung by Southey, is familiar to every one, for have we not all seen the tower in which the wicked Bishop thought to escape from the judgment pronounced upon him? In vain, however, for the army of rats swam the river by myriads, and climbed the shore and made their way to

the tower.

Down on his knees the Bishop fell

And faster and faster his beads did he tell,
As louder and louder, drawing near,
The gnawing of their teeth he could hear.
And in at the windows and in at the door,
And through the walls helter-skelter they pour,
And down from the ceiling and up through the
floor,

From the right and the left, from behind and before,

From within and without, from above and below,

And all at once to the Bishop they go.

They have whetted their teeth against the stones,
And now they pick the Bishop's bones;
They gnawed the flesh from every limb,
For they were sent to do judgment on him!

In several of the ballads the Devil plays a conspicuous part, for Southey, although after early life orthodox in creed and a sound churchman to boot, treated the evil spirit with contemptuous pleasantry as a goblin or imp of darkness rather than as a being to be abhorred and dreaded of all Christian souls. Among his poems of this class The Pious Painter and Cornelius Agrippa are perhaps the cleverest. Very admirable

too is the short and spirited tale of St. Romuald, which opens with a Frenchman stopping at an inn door and asking the landlord whether the holy saint was still to be found in his cell, to which the man replies sadly that he has left the neighborhood. And then the innkeeper describes St. Romuald's sanctity as proved by his love of dirt, and relates the fierce conflicts he had with Satan, who used to maul him like a Turk

"But," quoth the traveller, "wherefore did he leave

A flock that knew his saintly worth so well?" "Why," said the landlord, "sir, it so befell He heard unluckily of our intent

To do him a great honor: and you know,
He was not covetous of fame below,
And so by stealth one night away he went."

"What might this honor be?" the traveller cried; "Why, sir," the host replied,

"We thought perhaps that he might one day leave us;

And then should strangers have

The good man's grave,

A loss like that would naturally grieve us,
For he'll be made a saint of to be sure-
Therefore we thought it prudent to secure
His relics while we might;

And so we meant to strangle him one night."

The love of the incongruous, of the mystical, of the ridiculous, was as much a part of Southey's nature as the sober melancholy and the calmsightedness which led him at the height of his prosperity to write mournfully of life, and to look forward to the grave with hope. Overflowing as he was with intellectual activity, and possessing the frolicsomeness of spirit which most men leave behind them with their boyhood, his tears were drawn forth even more readily than laughter, and if there is comlife was marked by the deepest feeling, and paratively little pathos in his writings, his by a mournful tenderness as beautiful as it is affecting. It is probable that he instinctively avoided pathetic subjects when writ ing poetry, and that he did so in later life may be judged from the following beautiful stanzas, written in 1829:—

Nor marvel you if I prefer

Of playful themes to sing,
The October grove hath brighter tints
Than Summer or than Spring,

For o'er the leaves before they fall Such hues hath Nature thrown, That the woods wear in sunless days A sunshine of their own.

Why should I seek to call forth tears.?
The source from whence we weep
Too near the surface lies in youth,
In age it lies too deep.

As a poet, Southey cannot be classed with the great English Masters; as a prose writer, his manly, simple, flexible style may be regarded as a model. In reading his books, the attention is not immediately drawn to the form of the composition, as in the case of such mannerists as Lord Macaulay and Mr. Carlyle, but when it is examined it will be found to fulfil admirably the purpose of the writer.

"The reason why so many persons write ill," he said, "is because they think it necessary to write a style something different from the common speech." Southey was in no danger of falling into an error of this kind. He used the simplest words to express his thoughts, and it is never possible to mistake his meaning. No modern writer that we know of states facts more clearly or more honestly, but the judgment which he draws from his facts is often curiously perverse. The power of forming a wise judgment was not one of Southey's intellectual privileges. Like his friend Landor, he had the peculiarity, as Mr. Forster has pointed out, of putting the imagination and passions in the place of reason, and of thinking thus and thus by the mere force of his will and pleasure. "It was not ill said by an acute observer who knew them both, that their fault was not that of blindness to the truth so much as that of indifference to give it welcome unless as a discovery or possession of their own." This is true, we think, but true in a larger degree of Landor than of his friend. Southey had strong feelings, and reached his decisions by their help. He had not time to think out any subject calmly, and he was far too impetuous to judge of any serious question impartially. That the opinions of his early and ardent youth were not those of his mature manhood, can excite no wonder. Most men of original power pass through one or more mental revolutions before they find rest for the intellect and the heart, and to this rule Southey formed no exception. His fault lay in his unwillingness to grant to others the freedom of which he had made such ample use himself; but his integrity, so often questioned in his lifetime, may now be regarded as unimpeachable. "He has convinced me," wrote a

shrewd observer, "of the perfect exemption of his mind from all dishonorable motives in the change which has taken place in his practical politics and philosophy," and the publication of Southey's correspondence has confirmed the judgment of Crabb Robinson. There are some illustrious men who are never rash in speech, and who speak and write to their intimate friends with the most circumspect wisdom. They rarely make a mistake, or commit an absurdity, their propriety is exquisite, and when they die it may be safe to produce their correspondence without much editorial supervision. Southey was not one of these men; he wrote often rashly and thoughtlessly, and his hasty words, which expressed in many instances a momentary prejudice or feeling, have had the misfortune to be stereotyped in print. "In days of old," he once wrote, as if anticipating the injury that would be done him, "when an author was dead and buried, Requiescat in Pace might have been written on his tombstone: but those days are past, and he must expect now to be dissected and embalmed, to have his rags presented as relics, and to be canonized by his devotees." The "rags" have been zealously flaunted by Southey's "devotees," but there is some comfort in the thought that, thanks to the mode of preservation, they have failed to attract attention.

It cannot be denied, however, that reckless opinions are to be often found in his published works as well as in his correspondence, and thus it has come to pass that the most trustworthy of writers is at the same time the least satisfactory of guides. Thus, for instance, he does not scruple to assert in print that the Political Economists "are to the Government of this country such counsellors as the magicians were to Pharaoh; whosoever listens to them has his heart hardened;" and he terms the Wealth of Nations "a tedious and hard-hearted book, greatly overvalued even on the score of ability." He denounces our manufacturing system as a pest to society, which debases all who are engaged in it; he declares that "the Protestant cause sustained more injury from the English Puritans than from all the efforts of Spain and Austria combined, and of France also, when France put forth its strength against it;" and that the Puritans should be held up to contempt and in

famy and abhorrence." And again and again the liberal-minded reader is moved to something like contempt, or aroused to fierce anger, by the extravagant and narrow opinions put forth by Robert Southey. And yet Southey could write, expressing herein a feeling of which many of us must have been conscious, "I have an instinctive horror of bigotry. When Dissenters talk of the Establishment they make me feel like a High Churchman, and when I get among High Churchmen I am ready to take refuge in Dissent." On some points, it is but fair to add, Southey was in advance of his age. He writes wisely in many places of the imperative necessity of a national education, and he was one of the first to press upon the public the services that might be rendered by Protestant sisters-of-mercy and by ladies properly trained as hospital nurses.

In the Preface to the collected edition of his poems, Southey remarks that it was the greatest of all advantages to him to have lived more than half his life in retirement, conversing with books rather than men; but the reader who follows the poet's career will probably arrive at a precisely opposite conclusion. "Beware that you be not swallowed up in books," wrote John Wesley, and this assuredly was in many respects the misfortune of his biographer. "He was never happy," said Rogers, "except when making or reading a book;" and so inveterate was this love of solitary study, that in society Southey, feeling he had little conversational power, would "roll himself up like a hedgehog." Solitude may have many advantages, but it is scarcely calculated to produce breadth of thought or freedom from prejudice; and Southey, brooding tenderly and constantly over the wealth of his own mind, was not likely to discover its deficiencies. He needed collision with other intellects; but this salutary contact with his fellows he disliked, and, as much as possible, avoided. If we reckon his Quarterly Review articles, Southey produced in all nearly two hundred volumes, in itself a small library. Many of these works are more likely to be consulted than to be read; while some on which the writer set most count must stand, it is to be feared, on the shelves which contain (to use Lamb's familiar epithet) the books that are not books. Southey's magnum opus, the History of Portugal, was destined never to be finished, but

a portion of this vast undertaking, the History of Brazil, was accomplished to the entire satisfaction of the historian, who said that ages hence it will be found among those works which are not destined to perish, and be to the Brazilians, when they shall have become a powerful nation, what the work of Herodotus is to Europe. The prophecy cannot be contradicted, but it may fairly be questioned, and when we remember how many prophecies Southey made in his life-time, which have turned out to be delusions, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that this will also prove a blunder. The History of Brazil was an enormous achievement, but it was labor ill-bestowed, and Sir W. Scott characterizes it wisely, when he says, in writing to the author, "A more faithless and worthless set than both Dutch and Portuguese I have never read of, and it requires your knowledge of the springs of human action and your lively description of 'hair-breadth 'scapes' to make one care whether the hog bites the dog or the dog bites the hog."

Still less satisfactory in its results was the toil bestowed by Southey on his History of the Peninsular War, a work which has been since accomplished with consummate ability by a military historian. The Duke of Wellington spoke of Southey's History as wholly inadequate and as displaying gross ignorance, which was likely enough in matters of military detail, and here too, as in so many of his works, he wasted his strength and wearied the reader's patience by a display of useless erudition. Well would it have been for Southey's fame had he attended to the wise axiom of Dryden, which that great poet, by the way, sometimes forgot himself : "An author is not to write all he can, but only all he ought."

The truth is, and scores of instances might be cited in proof of it, that the Poet-Laureate, with all his ingenuity and learning and perseverance, and with a literary ability that might have enabled him to put what he knew in an attractive form, missed the mark again and again. He could not, for the life of him, distinguish between the topics to which he was specially attracted and the subjects likely to interest the public; he even thought that he had power to command attention whether his readers wished to attend or not. Sometimes he hit, as it were, by accident on a theme which was

fitted for popularity. The Life of Nelson is as beautiful a specimen of biography as we possess in the language, and for this fascinating work we are indebted, in a measure, to the publisher as well as to the author. Southey, though rebelling against the imposition, was happily restricted within certain narrow limits. He could have made the book, he said, ten times as long, and there can be no doubt that if he had had his way he would have done so and have spoilt it. His love of digression, of ingenious trifling, and of exhibiting in a half-serious, half-grotesque fashion the results of his prodigious acquisitions, is notably exhibited in The Doctor, a book which charms and annoys the reader by turns. "How beautiful!" he exclaims on reading one page: "How horribly wearisome!" he sighs out on turning to the next. On the whole, perhaps, the fatigue predominates over the pleasure, although there are moods of mind, moods of happy indolence for which there is little space in the busy lives of most men, in which this medley of humor, nonsense and wisdom may prove a grateful opiate. It has been said with some truth of Mr. Trollope's singularly clever novels, that they may be taken up at almost any time with pleasure and laid down again without serious regret, and perhaps a similar criticism may be passed upon The Doctor. In its best chapters it is eminently good, but it will keep, and no anxiety is felt to follow continuously the writer's footsteps. Open on any page, and some beautiful thought, or quaint suggestion, or grotesque anecdote will attract attention, but the reader is not allured on by what he reads, and deems it but little consequence on which page he may alight. We said that The Doctor may, to certain persons and in certain moods of mind, prove an agreeable sedative, but just as there are people who become excited instead of soothed by opium, so there are readers, we suspect, whom this strange book will irritate almost beyond endurance. The preface to Wordsworth's Excursion gave William Blake, the poet-artist, a stomach complaint, which nearly killed him; The Doctor, with its impertinent digressions and its perpetual movement towards a point it never attains, might produce a nervous attack.

The great charm of Southey's style, and his consummate skill as a biographer, are perhaps best displayed in the Life of Wes

ley; but there, too, his want of logical power is everywhere apparent. The facts which he states with scrupulous fidelity often palpably contradict the inferences he draws from them. Nor is this all; for the opinion of the writer, as given on one page, is sometimes entirely opposed to the opinion he utters on another, and at variance with his known principles. "O dear and honored Southey," writes Coleridge, "this, the favorite of my library among many favorites; this, the book which I can read for the twentieth time with delight, when I can read nothing else at all; this darling book is nevertheless an unsafe book for all of unsettled minds. How many admirable young men do I know, or have seen, whose minds would be a shuttlecock between the battledores which the bi-partite author keeps in motion !"

The truth is that Southey has the art of relating facts delightfully, and he relates them with the most scrupulous honesty, but when he leaves this firm ground and tries to fulfil the part of a philosophical historian, the weak side of his intellect becomes apparent. His intuitions are often right, his deliberate judgment, if such it may be called, is frequently wrong. Southey acknowledges that he could not stand severe thought, and indeed he was too busy a man in his profession to be a profound thinker.

Southey's contributions to the literature of English poetry are not many; but they are so able that it is to be deplored he did not carry out his intention of continuing the History left so imperfect by Warton. His knowledge of the subject was immense, and he might have produced a narrative full of critical and biographical interest and written in the purest English, which would have formed a text-book for students. His Life of Cowper, although in parts a little languid and diffusive, shows how admirably Southey could write about poets and poetry; but in this department of literature, as in others, he appears to have expended much comparatively useless strength. This was partly owing to his singular kindness of heart, which led him again and again to befriend those who needed help and deserved it. Southey, for example, by his friendship for Kirke White while living, and by the publication of his Remains after his decease, produced an interest in that young poet, which, to judge from the poems he left behind him,

was far beyond his deserts. The Lives of Uneducated Poets is another work, written with a benevolent object, which, if looked at apart from the kindly purpose of the writer, must be regarded as waste labor; but while we regret that the claims upon Southey prevented him oftentimes from accomplishing the work for which he was most fitted, it is pleasant at the same time to remember how ready he ever was to sacrifice personal aims to generous and selfdenying labors.

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust. With these actions the life of Southey

was crowded and ennobled. He said many a bitter thing in his day, made rash statements, uttered opinions of men and measures which will not bear a moment's examination; but he never knowingly did an unjust act, or shirked an obvious duty. To use a homely saying, his heart was all along in its right place; and if, as a politician and theologian, he sometimes indulged in what may be called feminine passion, the noble life he lived was one of the manliest, and is even more worthy of a place in the memory of Englishmen than his great literary achievements.-Cornhill Magazine.