ROBERT SOUTHEY.*

Tan nature of this admirable selection may best be defined in the words of the Editor as the story of Southey's life" told in his own words and linked together with a few editorial hooks- and-eyes ;" while its aim is "not to make a book, but to do honour to one of the best men this century has produced." The great bulk of Southey's correspondence thoroughly justifies some such process of condensation. Unlike Von Henke, another prodigy of literary achievement, who con- demned letter-writing as a waste of time, Southey, though perhaps fonder, as he admits, of the society of books than of his fellow-men, loved to pass a portion of the many hours he spent alone in thus conversing with those he loved. His letters, he owns in more than one passage, occupied more of his time and less of his mind than he could wish; but, as Mr.. Dennis justly says, in these letters the heart of the man is revealed in all its constancy and heroism and tenderness. In the whole republic of letters there never was a citizen better entitled to Simonides' description of the good man as " four-square without reproach." No one did more to elevate the dignity of his profession. No inducement could make him sacrifice his independence or " the leisure and tranquillity of a studious and private life." His unselfish love of literature showed itself in the fact that he was actuated in the choice of subjects solely by their interest. The magnum opus on which he hoped that his fame would ultimately rest, his History of Portugal, remained unpublished. Although for a great many years nothing afforded him such intense delight as the composition of poetry—as a young man he said he would sooner leave off eating than poetising—he restrained that impulse in accordance with the necessities of a situation which obliged him to feed many months, and all from an inkstand. Hehama was in great part composed before breakfast, as he would not " allow any other part of the day to an employment less important than that of writing history, and far less profit.. able than that of writing anything else, how humble or worth- less soever." It was not until he had been writing for a quarter of a century that he was at last able to demand a sum for a poem, nor until he reached his sixtieth year did he have the satisfaction of being provided with a year's expenses before- hand. In these days, when writers solemnly discuss the possi- bility of marriage on £700 a year, it is strange to read the letter in which Southey says, "If Coleridge and I can get £150 a year between us, we purpose marrying." But though Southey went through severe privations, and knew the pinch of poverty—he often walked the streets at dinner-time for want of a meal when he had not eighteenpence for the ordi- nary, nor bread and cheese at his lodgings—the generosity of his friends kept destitution from his door. It is to the eternal credit of our fathers who dwell in the Row, as Southey describes the much-maligned race of publishers, that one of their number befriended Southey in the hour of his need. " Your house," he writes to Cottle, " was my home when I had no other. The very money with which I bought my wedding-ring and paid my marriage fees was supplied by you. It was with your sister I left Edith during my six months' absence, and for the six months after my return it was from you that I received, week by week,. the little on which we lived, till I was enabled to live by other means." Wynn, one of the two life-long friends he made at school, furnished him with a small annuity in the earlier years of his married life ; and to his uncle Hill he was materially indebted for pecuniary assistance at the outset of his career. But Southey was no pensioner. He only took help when he could do so with a clear conscience. Again and again he refused to barter his independence for an assured income. The uncongenial nature of his employment as • Robert Southey : the-Story of Ilse Life, written in his Letters. Edited by John Denuir. Boston : D. Lothrop Company.

Secretary to the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer soon induced him to resign this "foolish office with a good salary."

Later on his detestation of cities made him decline a post on the staff of the Times, with a salary of £2,000 a year. When Landor, the only man living, as he tells us, of whose praise he was ambitious, or whose censure would have humbled him, offered to print as many poems as he could write at his (Landor's) expense, Southey declined this princely offer, though he admits that "it awakened in me old dreams and hopes which had been laid aside, and a stinging desire to go on, for the sake of showing him poem after poem, and saying, • I need not accept your offer, but I have done this because - you made it.'" Poor though he was, Southey was for ever taking voluntary burdens on his heavily weighted back. Not only in literature, but in everyday life he was given to works of supererogation. "His lavish generosity," says Mr. Dennis, " Was not due to impulse : it was a part of his life, and exhibited at every stage of it." And how hard that life was may best be expressed in that noble passage where he says :—

" If Gifford could see me by this fireside, where, like Nicodemus, one candle suffices me in a large room, he would see a man in a coat still more threadbare than his own' when he wrote his Imitation, working hard and getting little,—a bare maintenance, and hardly that ; writing poems and history for posterity with his whole heart and soul ; one- daily progressive in learning, not so learned as he is poor, not so poor as proud, not so proud as happy."

Southey's cheerfulness was indeed amazing. He had "an innate hilarity of spirit which nothing but real affliction can overcome." " What a blessing it is," he says, in another passage, " to have a boy's heart ! It is as great a blessing in carrying one through this world as to have a child's spirit will be in fitting us for the next." At the age of thirty-eight he speaks of his spirits as "invincibly good." "A healthy body.

an active mind, and a cheerful heart are the three best boons Nature can bestow ; and, God be praised, no man ever enjoyed them more perfectly." He had a happy knack, moreover, of making the most of his enjoyments, and compares himself in this regard to the Spaniard " who always put on his spectacles when he was about to eat cherries, that they might look the bigger and more tempting." In another important particular, again, he was fortunate above most of his fellow mortals,- " The devil never meddles with me in my unemployed moments ; my day-dreams are of a pleasanter nature." Southey's habitual lightheartedness, however, never bordered on levity.

It was rather the serene temper of a man who had for the motto of his life,— " Nil conscire sibi, nulls pallescere culpti."

Large draughts," he writes to his friend Townshend, "have been administered to me from both urns. No man has suffered keener sorrows, no man has been more profusely blest." The loss of his children affected him deeply, but an unshaken confidence in an ultimate reunion largely assuaged his grief. Writing of Wordsworth's bereavements, he says :—

" I believe he feels, as I have felt before him, that there is healing in the bitter cup' —that God takes from us those we love .as hostages for our faith (if I may so express myself)—and that to those who look to a reunion in a better world, where there shall be no separation and no mutability, except that which results from perpetual progressiveness, the evening becomes more delightful than the morning, and the sunset offers brighter and

• lovelier visions than those we build up in the morning clouds, and which disappear before the strength of the day."

In this conviction his happiness had its firmest root. "How unendurable," he exclaims, " would life be were it not for the belief that we shall meet again in a better state of existence. I do not know that person who is happier than myself, and who has more reason to be happy ; and never was man more habitually cheerful : but this belief is the root which gives life to all, and holds all fast." " And this belief," he writes at the age of forty-eight, " for many years has not been clouded with the shadow of a doubt." The scene of his day-dreams was constantly laid in the hereafter. "It will be a great delight to me in the next world," he writes • whimsically to Coleridge, " to take a fly and visit these old worthies, who are my only .society here, and to tell them what excellent company I found -them here at the lakes of Cumberland two centuries after .they had been dead and turned to dust." He had no fear of -death ; for, as he says, " Death has so often entered my doors that he and I have long been familiar."

It would be a great mistake to run away with the notion that Southey was an Aristides—a person of exasperating per- fection. There are plenty of passages in this little volume which testify to his keen love of a joke. He was immensely tickled by the grotesque aspect of the suicide in Hyde Park of a man wearing one of Coleridge's shirts with the name marked in full. Here, again, is a delightful passage from a letter to Sir Henry Taylor, of whom he says that he was the only one of a generation younger than his whom he had taken into his heart of hearts :—

" Have you seen the strange book which Anastasius Hope left for publication, and which his representatives, in spite of all dissuasion, have published ? His notion of immortality and heaven is, that at the consummation of all things he, and you and I, and John Murray, and Nebuchadnezzar, and Lambert the fat man, and the Living Skeleton and Queen Elizabeth and the Hottentot Venus, and Thurtell, and Probert, and the Twelve Apostles, and the noble army of martyrs, and Genghis Khan and all his armies, and Noah with all his ancestors and all his posterity, —yea, all men and all women and all children that have ever been or ever shall be, saints and sinners alike,—are all to be put together,

and made into one great celestial eternal human being do not like the scheme. I don't like the notion of being mixed up with Hume, and Hunt, and Whittle Harvey, and Philpotts, and Lord Althorpe and the Huns, and the Hottentots, and the Jews, and the Philistines, and the Scotch and the Irish. God forbid ! I hope to be I myself ; in an English heaven, with you yourself— you, and some others, without whom heaven would be no heaven to me."

The following passage from a letter to his daughter Katharine shows Southey in his most genial and playful humour :—

" And now, God bless you all I Rejoice, Baron Chinchilla, for I am coming again to ask of you whether you have everything that a cat's heart can desire ! Rejoice, Tommy Cockbairn, for I must have a new black coat ! and I have chosen that it should be the work of thy hands, not of a London tailor. Rejoice, Echo, for the voice thou lovest will soon awaken thee again in thy mountains Rejoice, Ben Wilson, for sample clogs are to be sent into the West Country, for the good of the Devonshire men !"

Here, finally, is an excellent saying on Jeffrey :—" Jeffrey, I hear, has written what his admirers call a crushing review of The Excursion. He might as well seat himself upon Skiddaw, and fancy that he crushed the mountain." • Mr. Dennis is to be congratulated without reserve on having achieved the aim he set before him,—that of giving an outline portrait of a great and good man. There is nothing in these pages that we could wish away. For mingled pleasure and profit this is one of the healthiest and most delightful volumes that we have ever met with.