SOUTHEY' 5 UNPUBLISHED LETTERS. * Jr generally wanting perhaps in force

and elevation, the style of Southey was excellent for its English, excellent in itself. His letters hitherto published are as attractive as his more elaborate prose works. There is about them a variety of topic, a soundness of judgment, a transparency of mind, and a something which is not exactly warmth or heartiness of character but still a some-

thing attracts the reader to the writer. He had also a fertility of thought, and a copiousness of diction, that not only flowed but seemed as if it could flow for ever.

Yet there is such a thing as " ne quid nimis " ; and in the six volumes of Southey's Life and Correspondence there was as much of his letter-writing as the world at large might care to have, especially as the events of his life, for the greater portion of it, were not more important than migrations from "the blue bed to the brown." Southey's Letters as they appeared in the volumes edited by his son, had the further advantage of being printed in connexion with the circumstances under which they were written ; and. though this may not affect their mere literary merit, it has a great effect on the reader, being almost the differ- ence between knowledge and ignorance. The correspondence selected by Mr. Cuthbert Southey to accompany the Life might also have been chosen from several letters on one topic, with reference to its intrinsic merit.

The present collection of Letters is, for the reasons above indi- cated, of a somewhat unsatisfactory nature. There are other causes conducing to want of interest. The reader of the Life fre- quently finds an inferior repetition of the topics with which he is already familiar ; nor is repetition always avoided in these volumes, but letters sometimes follow each other treating of the same thing. Those who are not acquainted with the circumstances of Southey's career and the character of his friends will hardly understand what they are reading. The topics of many of the letters are of so small or personal a kind, that they do not warrant publica- tion. Many are not equal to Southey's better epistles ; the ideas and language do not gush, and the jocularity is for the most part very flit. Southey scarcely had wit, or humour ; his notions of a joke were hardly even verbal—he deemed it to consist in some formal arrangement of words. The doggrel on the waters coming down at Lodore is one sample. In the following extract the jest seems to rest on the size of the letters : there are some oases where it appears to reside in the position of the words, which are placed all about the paper.

" Come to Keswick. Come ! Cons ! ! COME ! ! ! COME ! ! ! ! Half the calling would bring Dapper up-stairs, though this be forbidden ground ; and shall a dog be thus obedient, and you still disobey ? " Come ! Here is an artistic chair just arrived; where is the artist who is to sit in it ?

" COMB ! ! here is a whole bed ; make haste lest there should be only half-a-one.

COME !! ! I want to have my child christened ; and would you let her continue a heathen ?

" COME ! ! ! ! and see Skiddaw ; and walk over the bridge of my own making ; and be introduced to my dog Dapper, my most particular and in- timate friend.

" COME !

"R. B.,.

Under the circumstances and to the person addressed, this might be agreeable enough ; but time and type make sad havoc with private facetia3.

tato, John Wood Warter, B.D., mitt Chaech, Orford; Vicar of Wert rarrmg,

• Selections from the I,etters of Robert Southey -c. 4c. edited by his Satin-

Sussex. In four volumes. Volumes I. IL Pdblis ed by Longmans.

The very faults of the letters as compositions for the publics have one feature of interest for those who would wish to study Southey's character. They seem to reflect his most inward opin- ions at the time, and to display his weaknesses. Whole pages are occupied with accounts of the structure or story of his works exe- cuted or planned. This, however, might be merely information to intimate friends who were interested in his tasks ; but there is also a good deal of self-laudation, both positive and coinpara- tive. This is Southey on Jeffrey.

" When we reached the great city, Jeffrey was invited by a friend of Elmsley's to meet me at supper. As his review of ' Medea ' was then printed though not published, he thought proper to send it me first, that I might meet him or not, as I felt disposed. This was gentlemanly conduct. Having been reviewed now above threescore times, it is not very likely that I should feel much affected by praise or censure. I met lum in good- humour ; which, if I had not been disposed so to do, I could not have helped, on seeing an &mummies of five foot one, with a face which upon a larger scale would be handsome, but can now only be called pretty, einuneiatuig his words as if he had studied eelocution under John Thelwall, of whom in- deed he is an Elzevir edition in better binding. After supper we got upon the general question of taste. You would have been amused to have seen how he flourished about, endeavouring to imply an apology without making one, and talking at what he did not talk of,—and how I, on my part, with.out mentioning his review, quoted its phrases occasionally, took up his prin- ciples of criticism without once referring to their application, and, in the best-natured way in the world, made him fully sensible that he was—but five foot one ! Upon my soul, I cannot feel offended with a thing so insig- nificant. He has wit and readiness, but in taste and learning so mete a child, and so utterly feeble in intellect, that I was actually astonished. In- deed, the whole corps of Edinburgh Reviewers appear miserably puny to me, who have been accustomed to live with strong men."

His language in his more confidential letters is sometimes very unmeasured. Of Pitt and the Anti-Jacobins he had strong opin- ions, perhaps caused by the attacks of the Anti-Taeobin upon himself. On the death of Pitt in the spring, he writes—" The best thing he ever did was to die out of the way." In the autumn his anger had not subsided, for he "goes on" in this strain- " Fox's death (I fear he is dead) will throw everything into the hands of the Grenvilles. I am grieved at his death,--sorry that he did not the be- fore that wretched Pitt, that he might have been spared the disgrace of pro- nouncing a panegyrie upon such a coxcombly, insolent, empty-headed, long-winded braggadocio ; sorry that he ever came into power except upon his own terms ; and still more sorry that he has not lived long enough to prove that his intentions were RB good and upright as, in my soul, I believe them to have been. This party may go to the Devil, if they will ; any change that shall rid us of Lord Howick and Lord Henry Petty must be for the better."

There is truth in these axioms, though the temper is none of the best ; at all events in the last, which refers to the convention of °intro, and the early management of the Peninsular war.

"It seems as if there were some law of nature by which Governmenta were always to be behindhand with the people in wisdom, and never to adopt sound principles of conduct till long after all thinking men had considered them as axiomatic."

"I have no wish to draw up memorials for statesmen. The way to in- struct them is through the people : truth gets at them in that way in abont fifty years."

"God help 118, Rickman ! If anything can ruin Spain, and England too,

it will be such Generals and such M" tem as we are destined to be cursed with. Even now the game is in our own hands, if we knew how to play it. But these wretches have no principles of action, no moral courage ; their boldness is only face deep—bronze over plaster-of-paris heads ; and their talents just Nual to the dirty job-work which has long been the main busi- ness of what is called government in England."

We cannot say that allowance is to be made for velienienoe of language in the following singular passage touching different church religions, for no serious man would indulge in what is called "strong writing" on religious subjects. The meaning of Southey seems to be, that all churches, either by ceremonies or dogmas, overlay the fundamental truths of Christianity ; and that this drapery changes with opinions. He himself—not only here but elsewhere—speaks of believing in the fundamental truths, but not, it seems, in the superadded "fables." The allusion to America is curious, though it does not predict Mor- monism.

"The reign of fabulous Christianity must be drawing to its end. In France it is over, unless Bonaparte should take it in his head to endow the church better, for which I do not think he wants inclination so much as money. In Germany the thing is done,—the clergy are philosophizing Christians, or Christianizing philosophers. In my countries, Spain an Portugal, the old house stands ; but there is the dry rot in its timbers, the foundations are undermined, and the next earthquake will bring it down. Here I do not like the prospects : sooner or later a hungry Government will snap at the tithes ; the clergy will then become state pensioners or parish pensioners ; in the latter case more odious to the farmers than they are now in the former the first pensioners to be amerced of their stipends. Meantime, the damned system of Calvinism spreads like a pestilence among the lower classes. I have not the slightest doubt that the Calvinists will be the majority in less than half a century ; we see how catching the distem- per is, and do not see any means of stopping it. There is a good opening for a new religion, but the founder must start up in some of the darker parts of the world. It is America's turn to send out apostles. A new one there must be, when the old one is worn out. I am a believer in the truth of Christianity ; but truth will never do for the multitude : there is an ap- petite for faith in us, which, if it be not duly indulged, it turns to green skinless', and feeds upon chalk and cinders. The truth is man was not made for the world alone ; and speculations concerning the next will be found, at last, the most interesting to all of us."

The letters begin in 1790 and close in 1815; the interest in- creasing as the tame advances. The two volumes to come may he better than the present couple, from the same causes that im- prove their latter part—the nearer approach to our own times, and the wider range of the writer,