that Landor's opinion of the way in which affairs were at this time administered in England, repeatedly expressed to Southey during the past two years, has upon it the impress of very strong convictions unwarped by personal grievance or impatience; and the reader will perhaps not be sorry to have a few of these opinions laid before him. Originality and interest constitute their claim to preservation apart even from the character they illustrate.

VIII. PUBLIC AFFAIRS.

Southey's connection with Scott's scheme of the Edinburgh Register, for which he had undertaken to supply the history of each year as Burke did for Dodsley's, and in which he promised. Landor to give such account of Bonaparte as befitted a republican, led to occasional interchange between the friends on the political questions of the day more frank and outspoken than his Quarterly lucubrations at any time afforded. In the Review he was never able quite to unmuzzle himself; and it is curious to observe how ill from the first he and Gifford got on together both in politics and literature. As for the notice he wrote of Count Julian for the Quarterly, and by which he hoped to have given Landor satisfaction, Gifford had so completely knocked its brains out before publication, that no subsequent mention of it, to Landor or any one else, was ever made by the writer.

A prominent subject in their letters, nevertheless, is Southey's increasing work for the Quarterly, with which his grumb ling at the editor continues to keep pace; but he has good hope that he will not meddle with a forthcoming article on Methodism which he has written in reply to Sydney Smith's in the Edinburgh, and which he shall follow up in the number following with a mortal blow at Malthus, the especial object of his contempt and abhorrence. Then, after several months, while yet he is in pains of labour with his second product of history for the Register, his article on Methodism has appeared and given such delight to Perceval, that Southey feels he has lost a rich benefice by not going into the church.* There are, however,

This I need hardly say was Southey's destination originally, if he had found himself able to accept the Articles. I possess a curious little

M

subjects less pleasant. Had Landor seen Jeffrey's criticism on Kehama, as original as the poem and altogether matchless for impertinence? Characteristic was Landor's reply, in which the reader will not now care to criticise closely words out of which the heat and venom have long since departed. Jeffrey himself gave hard words in those days, and was prepared to receive them; but, though a greatly-overrated literary critic, he was at man of prodigious ability in various ways, of an unequalled quickness and keenness of intellect, and with a power of inspiring attachment possessed only by sincere fine natures.

'Jeffrey is called a clever man, I hear. If so, people may be clever men without knowing the nature of a lie, or the distinction between virtue and vice. No species of dishonesty is surely so unpardonable as Jeffrey's, no profligacy so flagitious. Thievery may arise from early example or from urgent want. It may have grown into an incurable habit, or have been pushed on by the necessities of nature. A man may commit even murder itself from the sudden and incontrollable impulse of a heart still uncorrupted; but he must possess one of a very different kind who can air and exercise his faculties on no other ground than the destruction of fame and the mortification of genius. I was once asked whether I would be introduced to this gentleman. My reply was, No, nor to any other rascal whatsoever. I like to speak plainly, and particularly so when the person of whom I speak may profit by it.'

That was in May 1811; and Jeffrey, if he could have read it and the letter which followed it in July, would doubtless have smiled at the worshipful society of rascals in which he found himself. Landor was then expecting his friend* at Llanthony, and thus continues:

'What a series of fools and scoundrels have managed this country! Surely such fellows as Pitt and Fox should never have gone farther than the vestry-room. A parish workhouse had been too much for their management, and they have been making a national one!'

It must at the same time be admitted that this sort of thing

note of Coleridge's to Cottle in 1796, consisting simply of these words: 'DEAR COTTLE, I congratulate Virtue and her friends that Robert Southey ' has relinquished all intentions of taking orders. He leaves our party, however, and means, he thinks, to study the law. Yours, S. T. COLE

RIDGE. 'Our party' was the Pantisocratic expedition.

* He cannot tell how to direct that letter, and the worst is, I never 'was right in my life if I hesitated.' Alas! it was his habit of not hesi tating oftener, and reflecting more, that led him into all kinds of intem. perances of act as well as speech.

was more harmless than Southey's occasional outbreaks. A few months later there is a letter of his, a strange medley of shrewdness and violence, criticising affairs in Spain, hopeful of Wellington, giving Bonaparte a lease of less than seven years, confident of seeing a peace dictated under the walls of Paris, and condemning the Spanish soldier Blake as a general, which ends by his declaring it humiliating that Spain should have produced two centuries ago half-a-dozen men resolute in a mistaken cause to slay the Prince of Orange at the sacrifice of their own lives, and that now she has not found one to aim a dagger at the heart of Bonaparte! Southey was more scrupulous than his friend as to flinging about reckless epithets; but where he felt very strongly, the flame of his anger burnt with a fiercer as well as a more intense glow.

Replying at the opening of 1812 from Bath, whither he had gone to meet his wife's father, Landor has a word to say for Bonaparte himself: 'It is terrible to think that, such is the state of Europe no nation can go on tolerably well without a 'usurper. France would have fallen without Bonaparte. The world is ruined by stupidity, and not by knavery or cruelty. There is not a government in Europe that might not be and should not be destroyed. But the French is unquestionably the best, because it is in the hands of the wisest; as for virtue or vice, the shades of difference are utterly undiscernible.'

This was written a few months before his scheme of finding a home for himself in France, which he was shamed out of so wisely by his brother Robert; but it was not to his discredit at this time that while denouncing as loudly as Southey the misdeeds of Bonaparte, he recognised not only his genius, which the other never did, but, in the fact of his being the ablest of living Frenchmen, some sort of reason for putting him at the head of France. There was no such comfort to be got out of a survey of the existing English government, whatever its other merits might be; and if the statesmanship possessed by Pitt and Fox were to be measured by the England they had left behind them, its ministerial purity, party fidelity, or national prosperity, Landor had some excuse for pitching it so low. It was a time when disasters were certain and

victories yet doubtful, and when the people were as unfairly restricted in their liberties as in their industry and enterprise. With the regency had begun the undisputed reign of the mediocrities, Mr. Perceval entering with the new year as Lords Grey and Grenville were finally bowed out; and England had become chiefly famous for Walcheren defeats abroad, for machinery-riots and bread-riots at home, and for every kind of revolting variety of ex-officio informations and furious attacks on the press. So great was the misery about Llanthony, Landor proceeds to say in his letter, that not only had his people ceased to be mischievous, but had even lost the spirit to exult in their landlord's losses and misfortunes. He puts the matter with a whimsical sense of humour that we cannot but smile at still.

'Three pounds of miserable bread costs two shillings at Abergavenny. The poor barbarous creatures in my parish have actually ceased to be mischievous, they are so miserable. We can find them employment at present, and four-and-sixpence a day; yet nothing can solace them for their difficulty in procuring bread. All my hay is spoilt. This is always worth a day's meal to them, but it can happen only once in the season. The poor devils are much to be pitied, for they really look now as if they hardly enjoyed it. It is their moulting-time, and they cannot crow.'

That letter was dated the 12th of February, and was crossed by a letter from Southey of two days' earlier date, written in much alarm. Trotter's book' was the life of Fox lately published by his secretary; and with Mr. Murray, the reader will remember, Landor had been placed in communication by the printing of his tragedy.

'About an hour ago came a parcel to me from Murray, containing among other things an unfinished commentary upon Trotter's book. Aut Landor, aut Diabolus. From the manner, from the force, from the vehemence, I concluded it must be yours, even before I fell upon the passage respecting Spain, which proved that it was yours. I could not lie down this night with an easy conscience if I did not beseech you to suspend the publication till you have cancelled some passages. It would equally grieve me to have the book supprest, or to have it appear as it is. It is yours and yours all over,-the non imitabile fulmen.'

On the 15th Landor replied, telling what the thing was, how it originated, and the objection Murray had himself made to a proposed dedication of it to the President of the United States, against whom England was then on the eve of a declaration of

war. This, the rejoinder of Southey, and the letters that followed, have characteristic value for the description they give, not only of the Commentary, of which a few copies got into subsequent circulation as 'Observations on Trotter's Life of 'Fox,' but of a companion tract called the Parallel, and of the Dedication, both suppressed. All that their author intended by them, their startling paradoxes, their personal attacks, and the strange combination throughout them of largeness and wisdom of view with proposals worthy of Laputa and an absurd intemperance of expression, these letters vividly depicted. But a few brief extracts only may be given.

'I will do precisely as you recommend, and request you particularly to mention such other passages as should be cancelled. . . I praised Hastings, and drew a comparison between him and Fox; but, said I, possibly this great ruler may have been deaf to the voice of misery and of justice. I drew a comparison also between Lord Peterboro' and Lord Wellington, in which I proved the latter to be equal to the other. In short, with reference to the military administration, I preferred the present to every other in this reign except Lord Chatham's. But I asked myself what source of corruption these Percevals and people had cut off? What protection they had given to freedom or to literature? After all, who will read anything I write? One enemy, an adept in bookery and reviewship, can without talents and without industry suppress in a great degree all my labours, as easily as a mischievous boy could crush with a roller a whole bed of crocuses. I am surprised that Murray should object to publish my dedication to the president of the United States. It is very temperate, and, I believe, not ineloquent. War is not declared; and I earnestly point out the mischief it would do America; how deplorable that freemen should contend with freemen, and diminish a number already so reduced! I never wrote anything better.'

In his allusions to America Landor had greatly the advantage of his friend, who had no indisposition to the war then imminent, and was ready to give credit to any absurdity that might help to put a wider breach between us and our transatlantic kinsmen. On the other hand, what Southey says of George Rose is not a bad comment on what Lord Shelburne is reported to have said to him: 'Good God, Mr. Rose, why have 'you not more ambition! Rose had been twenty years Pitt's secretary to the treasury, and was everybody's factotum in those days; but we may easily understand Landor's slowness to recognise abilities of which only the most meagre memorials have even yet come to light, though he has been dead half a centurv.