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This want of discrimination has led to many strange political speculations. Sir William Temple deduced a theory of government from the properties of the pyramid. Mr. Southey's whole system of finance is grounded on the phaenomena of evaporation and rain. In theology, this perverted ingenuity has made still wilder work. Yet we cannot wish that Bacon's wit had been less luxuriant.
For instance, in Southey's Don Roderick there is a cast of sentiment in the Gothic king's remorse and contrition of heart, which has struck many readers as utterly unsuitable to the social and moral development of that age, and redolent of modern methodism. This, however, we mention only as an illustration, without wishing to hazard an opinion upon the justice of that criticism.
In Portugal, when the high tide of wealth flowed in from the conquests in Africa and the East, the effect of that great influx was not more visible in the augmented splendour of the court, and the luxury of the higher ranks, than in the distress of the people." Mr. Southey's instance is not a very fortunate one.
Cowper wrote of Johnson's Diary: 'It is certain that the publisher of it is neither much a friend to the cause of religion nor to the author's memory; for, by the specimen of it that has reached us, it seems to contain only such stuff as has a direct tendency to expose both to ridicule. Southey's Cowper, v. 152.
In form it is something like Southey's Omniana, partly a commonplace book, partly full of original things; but the extracts are so choicely made and the original part is so delightful that it is not quite like any book in the language. If Charles Lamb had been of Mr. Locker's time and circumstances he might have made its fellow.
He received a guinea a column, and when he wrote a poem, as he did every little while, he sent it to a publisher who returned him a little good cash. Southey's wife went up to Keswick on a visit to see her sister, Mrs. Coleridge. Southey followed up to Keswick, and rather liked the situation. The Southeys and the Coleridges all lived together as one happy family.
The lecturer was surely in the right, who, though he saw his audience slinking away, refused to quit the chair while Plato staid. 'Powerful preacher as he was, writes Southey, 'he had neither strength nor acuteness of intellect, and his written compositions are nearly worthless. Southey's Wesley, i. 323. See ante, ii. 79. Mr. Burke. See ante, ii. 222, 285, note 3, and iii. 45.
After the pleasant sketches of pens so graceful as Southey's and Montgomery's; after the elaborate biography of Mr Philip, whose researches have left few desiderata for any subsequent devotee; indeed, after Bunyan's own graphic and characteristic narrative, the task on which we are now entering is one which, as we would have courted it the less, so we feel that we have peculiar facilities for performing it.
After joking at his own Pantheism he becomes amazingly practical, for it was, as Scott points out somewhere, a fault of Southey's to cling to the system of "half-profits," a fault which often made his enormous labours altogether unprofitable. "I-rise to I-set" = "getting-up to bed-time" seems to have been a favourite quip of his. "The Anthology" an Annual one edited by Southey.
The heroic couplet controlled him to the end of his life, and there is no doubt that it was not merely timidity that made him confine himself to the old beaten track. Crabbe's thoughts ran very much in antithesis, and the couplet suited this tendency. But it had its serious limitations. Southey's touching stanzas
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