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Updated: June 28, 2025
Another favorite in this book was Southey's poem "The Inchcape Bell," a story of a priest and a pirate. A good priest in order to warn seamen in dark stormy weather hung a big bell on the dangerous Inchcape Rock. The greater the storm and higher the waves, the louder rang the warning bell, until it was cut off and sunk by wicked Ralph the Rover.
Who would have stripped Southey's walls of the books that filled them, when, his mind no longer capable of taking in their meaning, he would still pat and fondle them with the vague loving sense of what they had once been to him, to him, the great scholar, now like a little child among his playthings?
Hill was Chaplain to the British Factory at Lisbon, and had a well-grounded faith in Southey's genius and character. He secured for his nephew some years of education at Westminster School, and when Southey was expelled by an unwise headmaster for a boyish jest, his uncle's faith in him held firm, and he was sent on to Balliol College, Oxford. Those were days of wild hope among the young.
Much of it I could dispute; but with the latter part of it, in which you compare the two Joans with respect to their predispositions for fanaticism, I toto corde coincide; only I think that Southey's strength rather lies in the description of the emotions of the Maid under the weight of inspiration.
Nor can we assent to the assertion, that in his ballads, metrical tales, and rhyming jeux-d'esprit, Southey's essay to be comic results in merely 'quaint and flippant dulness. Smartly enough he tells the story of the Well of St Keyne, whereof the legend is, that if the husband manage to secure a draught before his good dame, 'a happy man henceforth is he, for he shall be master for life. But if the wife should drink of it first 'God help the husband then! The traveller to whom a Cornishman narrates the tradition, compliments him with the assumption that he has profited by it in his matrimonial experience:
Southey manifests towards his opponents is, no doubt, in a great measure to be attributed to the manner in which he forms his opinions. Differences of taste, it has often been remarked, produce greater exasperation than differences on points of science. But this is not all. A peculiar austerity marks almost all Mr. Southey's judgments of men and actions.
Again, therefore, I must sign myself, "C. Bronte. "P.S. Pray, sir, excuse me for writing to you a second time; I could not help writing, partly to tell you how thankful I am for your kindness, and partly to let you know that your advice shall not be wasted; however sorrowfully and reluctantly it may be at first followed. I cannot deny myself the gratification of inserting Southey's reply:
On such occasions his writings are rescued from utter contempt and derision solely by the beauty and purity of the English. We find, we confess, so great a charm in Mr. Southey's style, that, even when be writes nonsense, we generally read it with pleasure except indeed when he tries to be droll. A more insufferable jester never existed.
There are certain old saws about the master's eye and about everybody's business, in which we place very great faith. There is, we have said, no consistency in Mr. Southey's political system. But if there be in his political system any leading principle, any one error which diverges more widely and variously than any other, it is that of which his theory about national works is a ramification.
The feelings which the leading contributors to that periodical habitually entertained towards a young and promising writer were in his case sharpened by political partisanship; and the just and measured severity which he infused into his criticism on Southey's "Colloquies of Society" brought down upon him the bludgeon to whose strokes poetic tradition has attributed the death of Keats.
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