Be here the darkness left; meet thou th' GIVE her the wreckage of strife –

From Macmillan's Magazine.

ROBERT SOUTHEY.

priella" and "Omniana," with all the rest, have to be sought in catalogues NEARLY seventy years ago Macaulay and got together, not indeed with imexpressed a doubt whether Southey's mense research (for none of them is poems would be read in half a century, exactly rare), but with some trouble bat was certain that, if read, they and delay. In any other country a dewould be admired. The doubt has cent if not a splendid complete edition certainly been justified; the certainty would long ago have enshrined and may seem more than a little doubtful. kept ou view work so admirable in Southey's character, which was once style always, frequently so excellent subjected to the most unjust, though in mere substance, so constantly enlinot perhaps the most unintelligible, vened with flashes of agreeable humor obloquy, has long been cleared; and or hardly less agreeable prejudice, and those who most dislike his matured above all informed by such an astonviews in political and ecclesiastical ishing knowledge of books. Johnson matters are the first to admit that few may have been fitted to grapple with English men of letters have a more whole libraries; but Southey did grapstainless record. His prose style, the ple with them, his industry being as merits of which were indeed never de- notoriously untiring as the great lexinied by any competent judges, has won cographer's was notoriously intermitmore and more praise from such judges tent. as time went on. But he is less read Even in the article of biography the than ever as a whole, and his poems same malign, and to some slight deare the least read part of him. These gree mysterious, fate has pursued him. poems, which the best critics of his His life was extremely uneventful; own generation admired; on which he but, except for the great catastrophe of himself counted, not in boastfulness or Sir Walter's speculative career, it was in pique, but with a serene and quiet not much more uneventful than Scott's. confidence, to make him as much ex- He was a delightful, though a somealted by the next age as he thought what too copious letter-writer; he himself unduly neglected by his own; knew at all times of his life some of which extorted a grudging tribute even the most interesting people of the day; from the prejudice of Byron, -now and scanty as were his means he was a fnd hardly any readers, and fewer hospitable host and an untiring ciceeven to praise than to read. Even rone in a country flooded every year among the few who have read them, with tourists. But he was as unlucky and who can discern their merits, es- in his biographers as Scott and Byron teem rather than enthusiasm is the were lucky. Cuthbert Southey appears common note; and esteem is about the to have been an excellent person of most fatal sentiment that can be ac- good taste and fair judgment, but poscorded to poetry. sessed of no great literary skill in general, and of no biographical genius in particular; while he had the additional disadvantage of being the youngest child, born too late to know much of his father, or of his father's affairs during earlier years. Dr. Warter,

It is of the prose rather than of the verse that Macaulay's prognostication has been thoroughly fulfilled. "The Life of Nelson " represents it a little less forlornly, but with hardly less injustice than "The Battle of Blenheim" and one or two other things represent Southey's son-in-law, had more literary the verse in the public memory. The ambition than Cuthbert; but he was stately quartos of "The History of deficient in judgment and in the indisBrazil" and "The Peninsular War," peusable power of selecting from the the decent octavos of "The Colloquies letters of a man who seems often to on the Progress and Prospects of Soci- have written much the same things to ety" and "The Book of the Church," three or four correspondents on the the handy little doudecimos of "Es-same day. The result is that though

"The Life and Correspondence" is a heirs of Lord Somerville. Southey, charming book as a book, with portraits however, never benefited by either, for and frontispieces showing the dead and his uncle's fortune went out of the delightful art of line-engraving at its family altogether, and it turned out best, and though both it and "The that Lord Somerville had somehow Selected Letters "" are full of interest, got the entail barred. His father, too, that interest is, in the ten volumes and failed and died early, and all the famperhaps five thousand pages of the ily assistance that he ever had came two, so frittered and duplicated, watered from the side of his mother, Margaret down and wasted, that only patient and Hill, who was pretty well connected. skilled extractors can get at it. An Her half-sister, Miss Tyler, extended a abridgment, putting the life together in capricious and tyrannical protection to Southey's own words, has, I believe, the boy in his extreme youth (turning been executed, and by no incompetent him out of doors later on the score .of hand; but there is always a curse on Pantisocracy and Miss Fricker), while abridgments. And besides, the charm her brother, Mr. Hill, a clergyman, of a biography consists hardly more in was Southey's Providence till long after the actual autobiographic matter, found he reached manhood. After a childin letters or otherwise, than in the hood (unimportant though interesting connecting framework. It is because to read about) in which he very early Boswell and Lockhart knew how to developed a passion for English literaexecute this framework in such a mas- ture, he was sent by his uncle to Westterly fashion that their books possess minster in the spring of 1788, and an immortality which even the conver- remained there with not much intersatious of Johnson, even the letters of mission till it was time for him to go to Scott could not have fully achieved by Oxford. themselves.

This latter translation, however, was not effected without alarums and excursions. Although Southey, neither as boy nor yet as man, was the kind of person thoroughly to enjoy or thoroughly profit by a public school, he was on the whole loyal to his own, and it produced a valuable and durable impression on him. The coarser, and more hackneyed advantage of "making friends" he had to the uttermost; for it was there that he made the acquaint

Southey, for whose early years there is practically no source of information but an autobiographic fragment written rather late in life, and dwelling on detail with interesting though rather disproportionate fulness, was born in Wine Street, Bristol, on the 12th of August, 1774. His birthday gave him, according to an astrological friend, "a gloomy capability of walking through desolation," but does not seem to have carried with it any sporting tendencies.ance At least his only recorded exploit in that way is the eccentric, and one would think slightly hazardous, one of shooting wasps with a horse-pistol loaded with sand. His father, also a Robert, was only a linendraper, but the Southeys, though, as their omnilegent representative confesses, so obscure that he never found the name in any book," were Somerset folk of old date and entitled to bear arms. They had, moreover, actual wealth in the possession of one of their members, the poet's uncle John Cannon Southey, and expectations in the shape of estates cntailed upon them in default of the male

of

Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, who was through life his patron as well as his friend, and of Grosvenor Bedford, his constant correspondent and intellectual double. He also profited' as much as need be in the matter of education, though, as has happened with other boys who have gone to school with more general information than solid instruction, he was promoted rather too rapidly to become a thorough scholar in the strict sense. Nor did some rough experiences in his early days do him much if any harm. But the end of his stage was in a way unfortunate. Nothing could have less resembled the real man than his ene

He

and long afterwards he notes that, though he was constantly dreaming of Westminster, he never dreamed of Oxford.

mies' representation of him as a supple | resenting even the shocking innovation and servile instrument, keen to note of his wearing his hair uncropped and and obstinate to seize the side on which unpowdered in hall. His tutor, with his bread was buttered, and born to be perhaps more frankness than sense of a frequenter of Mainchance Villa. As duty, said to him, "Mr. Southey, sir, a matter of fact he was always an un-you won't learn anything by my leccompromising and impracticable ideal- tures; so if you have any studies of ist, though with some safeguards to be your own, you had better pursue noticed presently. In his last days at them.” This he did by getting up at school he showed this quality just as five o'clock in the morning to breakhe did twenty or forty years later, fast (one shudders to hear) on "bread when he constantly struggled to write and cheese and red wine negus" walkin the Quarterly Review as if he were ing all over the country, learning to sole proprietor, sole editor, and sole swim and to row, and associating contributor thereof. It is needless to chiefly with men of his old school. say that in his time, as earlier and seems to have kept terms or not with a later, any Westminster boy of ability casualty somewhat surprising even in rather above the average, and of toler- that age of lax discipline and few or no able character and conduct, had his examinations; and after about a year future made plain by the way of Christ and a half of this sort of thing he Church or Trinity as the case might ceased to reside at all. It is scarcely be. But Southey must needs start a surprising that he should have felt periodical called the Flagellant, whereof very little affection for a place where the very title was in the circumstances he stayed so little and sat so loose; seditious, and in an early number made a direct attack on corporal punishment. This arousing the authorities, he confessed and expressed contrition; but the head master, Dr. Vincent, was im- In fact he was busy with thoughts placable, and not only insisted on his and schemes quite alien from the exleaving the school, but directly or in-isting scheme, or indeed from any posdirectly caused Dean Cyril Jackson to sible scheme, of the university. He refuse to receive him even as a com- had made the acquaintance of Colemoner at Christ Church. He matricu-ridge; his boyish friendship with the lated at Balliol without demur in Miss Frickers had ripened into an enNovember, 1792, going into residence gagement with one of them, Edith; he in January. Perhaps, indeed, though had, though the atrocities of the Terhis fortunes were now entering on a ror had much weakened his Gallorather prolonged low tide, this particu- mania, written "Joan of Arc," and he lar ill luck was, even from the lowest had plunged ardently into the famous point of view, not such very bad luck schemes of "Pantisocracy” and “Asafter all. At Christ Church even as a pheterism." Of these much has been commoner, much more as a junior stu- heard, though I never could make out dent, under such a dean as Jackson, why, of these two characteristic speciwho bore the sword by no means in mens of Estesian language, Pantisocvain, a youngster of Southey's tone racy should have secured a place in and temper, full of Jacobinism and all the general memory which its comits attendant crazes, would have come panion has not. As Coleridge's many probably, and rather sooner than later, biographers have made known, Panto some signal mischance, even more tisocrasy, a scheme for a socialist decided and damaging to his prospects colony in Pennsylvania or Wales or than the close of his Westminster anywhere, broke down; and it pleased career. At Balliol, though he was in Coleridge to consider that the blame no particularly good odor, they seem to was mainly Southey's. As a matter of have left him very much alone, not' fact it was impossible to start it with

out money, of which most of the Pan-orders, he should go to Lisbon (where tisocrats had none, and the others very Mr. Hill was chaplain) for six mouths little; and no doubt Southey, who, to "simmer down," and should then visionary as he still was, had some read law. Southey consented, but, common sense and a very keen sense resolving to make desertion of his beof what was due to others, saw that to trothed impossible, married Edith attempt it would be cruel and criminal. | Fricker on November 14th, 1795, and While Coleridge had been ecstatically parted from her at the church door. formulating his enthusiasm in such This marriage, and the Portuguese sentences as "America! Southey journey which immediately succeeded, Miss Fricker ! Pantisocracy!" his may be said to have finally settled more practical friend was inquiring of Southey's fortunes in life, young as he Mr. Midshipman Thomas Southey, his was at the time. He was never the brother, "What do your common blue man to shirk a responsibility, and trousers cost?" Alas! when a man though for some time to come he loycombines even an enthusiastic love for ally attempted to read law, he soon Aspheterism with a sense of the cost made up his mind that it was never of common blue trousers, the end can-likely to give him a livelihood. not be doubtful.

On t

the other haud his visit to the Peninsula, with the interest thus created in 4 its history and languages, gave him that central subject and occupation which is almost indispensable to a working man of letters (such as he was marked out to be and soon became) if he is not to be a mere bookseller's hack.

1

If, however, anybody imagined (and indeed the manufacturers of "Mr. Feathernest" did try to set up such a notion) that Southey relinquished his generous schemes of honest toil abroad for a life of pensioned and voluptuous infamy at home, it was a very vain imagination. For a time, in October, Directly, indeed, Southey's i 1794, and later, his prospects were Spanish and Portuguese books and about as little encouraging as those of studies were about the least remunerany young man in England. He had ative of all his mostly ill-paid work. steadfastly resolved not to take orders, The great "History of Portugal,” the cardinal point of his benevolent planned almost at once, never saw the uncle's scheme for him; his aunt light at all; and "The History of Bra- | turned him out of doors; his mother zil," its more manageable offshoot and had nothing to give him; and his in- episode, was but an unprofitable book. tended bride was penniless. His But this visit to Lisbon, and another of wants, however, were exceedingly mod-somewhat longer duration which he est, but fifty pounds a year. He de- took with his wife some years later, livered historical lectures at Bristol, were of immense service. They thorlectures of the beautiful sweeping sort oughly established his health, which ("from the Origin of Society to the had been anything but strong; they American War") which the intelligent gave him, as has been said, a central undergraduate delights in; and they subject to work upon in which he beseem to have been not unsuccessful. came an authority, and which served John Scott, the future victim of that as tie-beam and king-post both to his unlucky duel, undertook to find him multifarious work; and they furnished journalism at a guinea and a half a him with one of those invaluable stores week, though it is not clear that this of varied and pleasurable memory than ever came to anything. Cottle (Jo- which nothing is of more consequence seph of Bristol, the brother of Amos) to a man whose life is to be passed in gave him fifty guineas for "Joan of apparently monotonous study. Arc" and as many copies of the book more than once planned a third visit, to get rid of by subscription. Lastly, but war, scanty finances, unceasing Mr. Hill, his unwearied uncle, sug- occupations, and other things prevented gested that, as he would not take it; and though in his later years he

He