vice of literature. His contributions, metri-view' and Sir Richard Philips's 'Monthly cal and critical, to the periodical press of the Magazine.' He first met the poet (by nine time, opened a new and a rich vein he was years his junior) at the house of a common treated accordingly by its proprietors and conductors with an eagerness of attention such as seldom falls to the share of any but a great original genius; and this will surprise no one who considers what a dim and drizzling twilight that was which intervened between the obscuration of Cowper and the outblazing of the galaxy that has not yet entirely passed away. As literary demands and connections multiplied, his attendance at the countinghouse became slacker and slacker. Before he turned the corner of thirty he seems to have pretty nearly settled into the 'gown and slipper' habits of a confirmed bachelor, and a confirmed miscellanist. Had he married at the proper time of life, he would have had motives for either not neglecting his father's friend in Yarmouth, and they took to each other so heartily, that Southey not long afterwards revisited Norfolk to pass several weeks under Taylor's roof. His younger brother, Henry Southey, was by and bye domesticated at Norwich as the pupil of an eminent surgeon there, and Taylor conceiving a warm affection for the youth, and superintending with a paternal care the direction of his extra-professional studies, the letters between him and the poet assume by no slow degrees such a character of entire trust and confidence as might have beseemed the intercourse of near and dear blood relations. To the correspondence begun under these interesting circumstances, and continued, with few interruptions, until near the end of Mr. Taylor's life, illustrating trade, or carrying a more strenuous spirit of as it does in a very lively manner the course enterprise into the department of letters: but this is one of the very few biographies in which there occurs from beginning to end no hint or trace whatever of any tender passion or attachment. Though his writings indicate no coldness of temperament, but the reverse, he appears to have declared from the very first that he never would marry-and he stuck to that resolution as doggedly as he did to his German lore, and what was, we suspect, a main source of all his errors and neglects, his Meerschaum pipe. One of his earliest acquaintances out of the Norwich circle was Godwin; but they had not met for several years when that philosopher happened through Norwich shortly after his marriage with Mary Wolstonecraft. His salutation to Taylor was an expression of surprise at finding him still a bachelor. 'Yes, Sir,' said Taylor dryly, 'I practice what I preach.'* to pass It was in the summer of 1798 that the secretary of the Norwich 'Revolutionary Society' made acquaintance with Mr. Southey, whose early opinions on many subjects were akin to his own, and who was, we believe, a brother-contributor to both the 'Monthly Re as * So did not in this matter an elder and a better light of Norwich. The Religio Medici was yet a new book, when Sir Thomas Browne espoused, Whitefoot records, 'a lady of such symmetrical perfection to her worthy husband, both in the graces of her body and mind, that they seemed to come together by a kind of natural magnetism.' Johnson adds: This marriage could not but draw the raillery of contemporary wits upon a man who had just been wishing "that we might procreate, like trees, without conjunction;" and had lately declared that "the whole world was made for man, but only the twelfth part of man for woman," and that "man is the whole world, but woman only the rib or crooked part of man."' of the late Laureate's literary history, the changes that his mind underwent, and the unchangeable warmth and purity of his heart and feelings, the present volumes owe their highest attraction. The publication of Mr. Southey's letters was authorized by himselfshortly after the death of his Norwich friend: seventy-three of them are here printed. It must indeed have been with very peculiar feelings that the grey-haired Laureate revised some of these communications for the press. On the 10th of August, 1798, Mr. Taylor writes to him thus : 'I have just been reading a delightful book entitled " A Picture of Christian Philosophy," by Robert Fellowes. Such a work, and from a clergyman of the Establishment, is indeed an omen of better times. The character of Burke is remarkably well given in one of the notes. Those of Rousseau and of Paine are to my thinking not quite so fortunate; that of Jesus is drawn exactly as it should be in the manner most conducive to its useful operation on public morality, and most consonant with the general design of his proper historians. This is infinitely the best answer to Wilberforce's cant which has yet been produced, but is, I fear, of too refined an order to operate on the organs of his followers-it is attempting with otter of roses to aromatize the fumes of tobacco. ... 'I am idling away my leisure in settling questions of chronology. I have stumbled on the new hypothesis, that the Nebuchadnezzar of Scripture is the Cyrus of Greek history, which annihilates seventy years of received story supposed to pass between them. To compress and squeeze together the annals of Egypt sufficiently, has given me most embarrassment. A second proposition is, that Daniel, the Jew, a favorite of this prince, wrote all those oracles scattered in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, relative to his enterprises, for the particularization of which they afford ample materials. Ishall endeavor to unite the several investigations in an essay on the life by his parents, and to which he returned in of Cyrus. Will it be a sin this tenth of August to trans the sobriety of his matured and disciplined cribe you an attempt at an ode on the death of understanding. But the whole of that deep Messrs. Shears of Dublin?' [This is a long rebellious lyric, in phrase and metre as un-English as in sentiments, which we need not transcribe.] 'Many who read your writings forgive your opinions for the sake of the poetry. You are called on for an opposite indulgence-forgive the poetry for the sake of the sentiments. 'Your very affectionate, Next week Mr. Southey says in reply (inter alia) : 'I thank you for your ode. You have taught me enough of Klopstock to see that you have caught his manner. The Irish business has been almost a counterpart to the death of the Girondists; yet who would not he content so to die, in order so to have lived? 'I shall look for Fellowes's book. Your chronological researches I can only wonder at; my studies have never been directed that way. Have you seen a volume of Lyrical Ballads, &c.? They are by Coleridge and Wordsworth, but their names are not affixed. Coleridge's ballad of "The Ancient Mariner " is, I think, the clumsiest attempt at German sublimity I ever saw. Many of the others are very fine; and some I shall re-read, upon the same principle that led me through Trissino, whenever I am afraid of writing like a child or an old woman. 'God bless you,-yours truly, ROBERT SOUTHEY." ly-interesting story will be told ere long by Mr. Southey's own selected biographer, having at command his entire correspondence, and we believe a MS. poem expressly designed to set forth the hidden life of his mind. At present our business is with him only as the friend of William Taylor-the freedom with which the two men from the beginning communicated their thoughts and sentiments to each other, and the perfect charity with which they continued this intercourse in the midst of growing divergence of opinion, and after Mr. Southey's creed, political and religious, had become what it was to the last, the very opposite of Taylor's. Another of Taylor's eminent early friends was Sir James Mackintosh. They first met at Edinburgh, where Taylor twice visited Sayers, while, like Mackintosh, pursuing his medical studies at the Northern University. Upon being called to the bar here Sir James made choice of the Norfolk circuit, and during the Norwich assizes he either took up his abode under Taylor's roof or spent the evening in his society. One of Taylor's first known attempts in original verse was a lofty but stiff sonnet to the author of the Vindicia Gallica; and many eulogistic notices of Taylor's talents and sly good-humored allusions to his hopeless heresies of taste and style, are scat About the same time, Taylor, in criticis-tered over Mackintosh's Indian diaries and ing some of Southey's verses, gives him the letters; but if they were ever in the habit of pithy advice to 'squeeze out more of his epistolary correspondence, we have no proof whey'-a phrase which is often revived between them-and then rebukes him for some doctrinal and moral aberrations, of what nature we may guess from the reply : of it in this book. On the other hand, though Taylor and Coleridge never saw each other, community of connections and sympathies of studies made it natural for them to write to each other when occasion 'Barker is painting a picture from "Mary the Maid of the Inn," but from what part of the invited: and though neither was there any story I have not learnt. He might have found personal acquaintance between Taylor and better subjects in my better pieces. My "St. Mr. Wordsworth, nor was Mr. Wordsworth Anthony" has no morality at all. Sophistry at any period so unfortunate as to adopt any may be expected from the devil, whose object of Mr. Taylor's doctrinal errors, it is not sur in arguing is to puzzle his adversary. The eclogue was written before Lloyd's "Lines on the Fast," and "Letter to the Anti-jacobin" actly upon the same principle that Charles had reached me; but Satan defends himself ex Lloyd defends existing establishments.' We have quoted enough to show how Taylor and Southey agreed in their early politics; and the reader of Southey's early poetry, as originally published, and of his Letters from Spain and Portugal in 1796, was already well that he in the pride of youth wandered far from the Church of England, in whose principles he was educated aware prising that in this case also we should find traces of mutual regard, and now and then the exchange through Southey of friendly messages and criticisms. Taylor says on Mackintosh's first visit at Norwich: 'Dr. Parr and Mackintosh have been in Norwich "Ceu duo nubigenæ quum vertice montis ab alto Descendunt Centauri." They are both very dazzling men. One scarcely knows whether to admire most the oracular significance and compact rotundity of the single sentences of Parr, or the easy flow and glittering expansion of the unwearied and unwearying eloquence of Mackintosh. Parr's far-darting the same habits of profuse hospitality. Wil hyperboles and gorgeous tropes array the fragments of his conversation in the gaudiest trim. Mackintosh's cohesion of idea and clearness of intellect give to his sweeps of discussion a more instructive importance. Parr has the manners of a pedant, Mackintosh of a gentleman. Of course people in general look up to Parr with liam Taylor is now entirely devoted to his literary studies and magazine engagements during the morning hours, dividing the rest of his time between the most affectionate attention to his parents, the pleasures of their social circle, and the intellectual and con There is a lovingness of heart about Parr, a sus awe, and feel esteem for him rather than love; vivial activity of his clubs of liberalism and while Mackintosh conciliates and fascinates. In free-thinking. He soon became an active this feeling I do not coincide with others wholly. journalist-but this implied in his case a ceptibility of the affections, which would endear very helluo librorum. He was not to be conhim even without his Greek. But admiration tented with skimming surfaces-though he is, if I mistake not, yet more gratifying to Mackin- had, in his command of the continental lantosh than attachment; to personal partialities guages, the means of satisfying his editors he inclines less. His opinions are sensibly aris- and their readers at comparatively little cost tocratized since the publication of his "Vin- of labor to himself, he disdained to make diciæ;" but they retain a grandeur of outline, himself the mere exponent of other men's and are approaching the manner of the constitutional school. Mackintosh's memory is well stored with fine passages, Latin and English, which he repeats; and his taste in poetry inclines to metrical philosophy rather than pathos or fancy. Milton, Dryden, and Pope have alone sufficient good sense to please him. Virgil he overrates, I think, and Cicero too. Style and again style is the topic of his praise. Čareless writing, redolent of mind, is better than all the varnish of composition, merely artful. I was surprised to find him agree with the French in thinking Bossuet very eloquent; and still more so at his rating so very high the panegyric mysticism of Bishop Jeremy Taylor.'-vol. i. pp. 295-298. Southey answers : works and views, worked out every subject in his own way for himself, and was undoubtedly more instrumental than any man of his standing in introducing that more discursive and essay-like fashion of reviewal which our Edinburgh brethren had the merit or demerit (there is much to be said on both sides) of ultimately, and we believe permanently, popularizing in this country. Though, as we have already observed, his classical education was slight, and he never attained any thing like a critical skill in Greek or Latin, his curiosity was too genuine to be satisfied without very extensive exploration of the remains of antiquity, and 'You give me a more favorable account of with the help of the numberless excellent Mackintosh than I have been accustomed to re-translations and ingenious disquisitions errors ceive. Coleridge has seen much of him at the Wedgewoods'. He describes him as acute in argument, more skilful in detecting the logical of his adversary than in propounding truth himself-a man accustomed to the gladiatorship of conversation-a literary fencer, who parries better than he thrusts. I suspect that, in praising Jeremy Taylor and in overrating him, he talks after Coleridge, who is a heathen in literature, and ranks the old bishop among his demigods.' Our readers will by and bye remember with astonishment what William Taylor said at this time concerning "style and again style;" but we must not lose sight of his personal story. The foreign commerce of the house of Taylor and Co. had received a serious blow on the breaking out of the war with revolutionary France, and among other changes, which his mastery of German placed at his command, he certainly attained such an acquaintance with the history and manners and philosophical systems of the old world as was in his earlier day most rare among the ablest prosodists and variæ lectiones men of our universities. That he had made some progress in Hebrew and its cognate dialects is also evident-we do not profess to measure it; with so many German manuals at his elbow, a man of his cleverness might produce much article effect with but a slender stock of real Orientalism; but he himself in his letters to Southey now and then alludes to his expertness in the use of his hidden resources for that sort of mystification, with an easy sportiveness which the mere charlatan never had courage for, and which probably rather exaggerates the matter than other not long afterwards, the idle partner's name wise. Of his skill in the cultivated lanwas dropt, while the old gentleman yielded guages of the modern continent there can the chief control of the remaining business be no question. He spoke and wrote the to a more active person, and withdrew a con- three most important ones with rare ease and siderable capital, to be invested by way of very rare accuracy; and he knew enough permanent provision for his son in mortgages of the minor dialects, whether Romance or and in the funds. The family continued in Teutonic, to read in them whatever they had the same spacious house at Norwich, and in worth reading. Probably no man ever re viewed books written in such a variety of languages and he whom we have just heard expatiating on the charm of 'careless writing, redolent of mind,' reviewed them all in a style as thoroughly artificial as was ever compounded out of Gibbonism and Parrism; nay, it is not too much to say in a dialect of his own invention, which was adhered to with paternal steadfastness in spite of the solemn reclamations of every editor with whom he formed any connection-in spite of remonstrances and rebukes that led to the breaking up of more than one such connection-in spite of the pressing and affectionate appeals which Southey repeated until the case was utterly hopeless-and in spite of a thousand friendly jokes and jibes from the gall-less Mackintosh, who also at last gave it up in despair, saying in his Bombay diary, 'Well, there is no help-I am content to add another tongue to my list for the sake of one author.' This Taylorian dialect is mainly English of a Johnsonian cast, spoilt and distorted by the embroidery of vocables from the German, but still more frequently by the introduction of new compounds framed according to the German principle, and involutions of phrase and syntax adopted with similar in own reviewals, I should say-This man's style has an ambitious singularity, which, like chewing ginseng, displeases at first and attaches at last. In his pursuit of the curiosa felicitas, he often sacrifices felicity to curiosity of expression: with much philological knowledge, and much familiarity among the European classics of all sorts, his innovations are mostly defensible, and his allusions mostly pertinent; yet they have both an unusuality which startles, and which, if ultimately approved, provokes at least an anterior discussion that is unpleasant. His highest merit is the appropriate application of his information: in his account of Rivarol you discover only his philological; in his account of Eichhorn only his theological; in his account of Gillier only his artistical; and of Wieland only his belles-lettristical pedantry, &c.' We make no attempt to follow our biographer through the long array of Mr. Taylor's critical labors. They embraced a vast variety of subjects-philology, especially etymology, chronology, topography, history, sacred and profane, ancient and modern, political economy and statistics, international law, Talmudic legend, Mahometan ethics, Biblical texts, churches and sects, parliamentary reform, slave-trade-and, the catalogue would fill a couple of pages, almost every possible branch of the belles-lettres of modern Eu felicity from the same quarter. But in his rope. The editor has interwoven specimens, 'Babel-like structure,' as Southey calls it, few materials were inadmissible. Words and turns, old or new, from south or north, east or west, whenever they seemed capable of being employed so as to lend precision to his sentence, or to heighten the strut of his paragraph, were alike lawful plunder in the eyes of Mr. Taylor. That even to those who were skilled in the sources of his plunder, he did not often make his meaning clearer by the free use of such license, may be readily conceived; but he of course made himself very often utterly unintelligible to the read ing public, who could not translate him for themselves, as they went on, into Dutch: and we should have lamented indeed his adherence to the dialect, had the doctrines it mostly conveyed not been as heterogeneous and presumptuous as the vehicle. This is to be said to his credit, as compared with some other Babel-mongers, perverted by studies not dissimilar from his, that however difficult his phraseology, it does not seem ever to have been made obscure either from mistiness in his ideas themselves, or from reluctance to disclose them. It is impossible not to be diverted with his description of his own style, in a letter to Southey of 1799 :— 'I think it easier you should always know me in prose than in verse. Were I reviewing my with, we are willing to believe, a good discrimination; and he hints at some larger selection by and by. We doubt if the public will encourage him in that design : it is a very remarkable fact, that no collection of re viewals has as yet proved a successful bookseller's speculation. We are not exactly prepared to adopt the maxim of an eminent doctor of the craft, that the best reviewer is he who has had least great English knowledge of his subject until he begins to prepare for his article: but undoubtedly the outpourings of a vigorous writer on a fresh theme may often surpass, in popular attraction, the pages in which one of equal power indulges the gentler enthusiasm of old love. Perhaps some of Taylor's on authors are among the most striking examples of this. The rush of novel ideas masters the man; and he forgets occasionally through a whole printed page, as he often enough does in a friendly letter, that it is below his dignity to express himself in his plain mother tongue. In one of his papers on Milton's prose, he is so carried away by the magic of novelty as to proclaim Milton's poetry a very inferior species of manufacture. But he is somewhat cooled when he says to Southey a few weeks later : "A. Aikin sent me the new edition of Milton's Prose Works. Instead of meddling with Sym writes : In September, 1798, Taylor mond's biography, which was almost my whole per? Such glimpses of Southey, at all events, duty, I have reviewed Milton's pamphlets one by must have no ordinary value for all our one, as if they were new publications. It is readers. pleasant to get out of the modern shrubberies in perpetual flower, into the stately yew-hedge walks, and vased and statued terraces, and fruitful walls and marble fountains, of the old school of oratory. Such things are not made without a greater expense of study and of brains than modern method requires; and yet there is a something of stiffness and inutility to censure there, and as omething of aptness, grace, and convenience to applaud here.' We wish the editor had afforded more explanatory notes as to various persons mentioned in this correspondence, whose celebrity has already pretty well passed away. Of Mr. Lloyd, indeed, we have a sufficient account in one of the Appendices to Southey's edition of Cowper-but of others who fill no small space in these letters, and who at the time were objects of general curiosity and high expectation, the generation that now is knows little or nothing. Such is the case as to the friend who brought Southey and Taylor together-Mr. George Burnett, of whose literary performances only one, we believe, can be said to have escaped utter oblivion-a small volume of letters from Poland, written about the beginning of this century-a lively and amusing book, which was on its first appearance very popular-the first English book that gave any detailed view of modern Polish society. We see that Burnett was born near Southey's native city of Bristol, the son of a then flourishing farmer, and that he was Southey's fellow-student at Balliol we infer from the name of that college on the titlepage of the Polish letters. When he introduced Southey to Taylor he was minister of an Unitarian chapel at Yarmouth. He after 'Your friend Mr. Lloyd has been addressing to me a tragedy. I thought it odd he should send to me his poem to read; he has older and dearer friends, who are better judges of the taste of an English public than I, whose taste has been moulded on that of a foreign public. I wrote to him very freezingly-I do not know enough of his heart as yet to take strong interest in his head. The afternoon I drank tea with him at Burnett's, he struck me as better qualified to assert empire over the understanding than over the feelings-as a good reasoner-as a man of great capacities. His sensibility, I suspect, is too soon excited to be very profound, and attains its maximum of irritation by inferior woes. It is a mark of debility, not of vigor, in children and old men to be intoxicated with a small quantity of wine. Those who can die of a rose in aromatic pain have not grief in reserve for Medea's last embrace of her children. If I am wrong, set me right about Lloyd. Is not he one of those men who underrate their talents and overrate their productions, and who are too much used to complaisance to bear severity?" Southey's reply has this passage : 'Lloyd has promised me his tragedy, and I have been for some time vainly expecting it. You have well charactered him. A long acquaintance would enable you to add to what you have said, not to alter it. Lloyd is precipitate in all his feelings, and ready to be the dupe of any one who will profess attachment. I never knew a man so delighted with the exteriors of friendship. He was once dissatisfied with me for a coldness and freedom of manner: it soon wore off, and I believe he now sincerely regards me, though the only person who has ever upon all occasions advised, at times reproved him, in unpalliated terms. Certainly he is a powerful reasoner, but he has an unhappy propensity to findout wards studied medicine at Edinburgh-failed a reason for every thing he does: and whether he in the attempt to establish himself as a prac- drink wine or water, it is always metaphysically titioner in some provincial town-wentabroad right. His feelings are always good, but he has as secretary and librarian to a Polish noble- not activity enough for beneficence. I look at his talents with admiration, but almost fear that man, with whom he in about a year quar- they will leave no adequate testimony behind relled-and hung about London after his re- them. I love him, but I cannot esteem him, and turn, a mere adventurer of the periodical so I told him. He thinks nothing but what is press, which career his idle irresolute charac- good, but then he only thinks. I fear he will ter seems to have made peculiarly unhappy. never be useful to others or happy in himself." Of his erd we know nothing. Many of In a subsequent letter, chiefly occupied Southey's allusions to this gentleman and with a family quarrel of poor Burnett's, on others of a similar class are dark as the darkest enigmas of Taylorism, for want of a note which we can hardly think it would have cost the editor much trouble to supply. In general, however, our quotations are made for the sake of sentiments or opinions that may stand by themselves-sketches of other men that are by reflex autobiographic-as indeed which Southey had as usual spoken his mind without disguise, Taylor, who objected to interfere, gives this reason for his conduct : 'I shall avoid that sort of comment which sin cerity perhaps requires, but which, as it respects a question of the finer feelings, would inflict an unhealable though invisible wound on our relations of intimacy. who can criticise his fellow-beings without At the time when Southey was bestowing throwing light on his own character and tem- so much of his anxiety on the struggles of |