learning directed the light to fall.'-vol. ii. pp. ❘ do it, should willingly finish Kehama; but being

60-63.

like Shakspeare's apothecary, lean, and obliged to do what I do not like, my ways and means lead me another way, and I am prosing, not altogether against my will, and yet not with my will.'

He was still, it seems, a pretty regular attendant of several clubs and evening societies. One, called 'the Conversation,' admitted ladies; but the biographer seems to When Madoc was at last published, it readmit that this did not find the highest favor opened this correspondence, which had with him. Another, 'the Foreign,' had been paused for some months. begun by a set of young men who wished to cultivate the colloquial use of the continental Norwich April 5, 1805. languages, and who were surprised as well as 'My dear Friend,-Yesterday, at eleven o'clock, the wagoner brought me a copy of flattered when Taylor proposed to join them. Madoc. I was going on foot to dine in the He became their Magnus Apollo-entered country, at Coltishall, but I could not pluck into all their pursuits, topics, and merri- myself from the book, and staid at home the ments; and seemed as young as the youngest whole day. I did get my dinner just after the when among them. The biographer extols this as a proof of his extreme good-nature; but though he was a truly good-natured man, we suspect some vanity may have mingled in the matter of the stripling club-perhaps also a little of the spirit of proselytism.

To a letter in which he told Southey of the repudiation affairs and of his anxiety to achieve some literary work of more value than his 'Articles, the poet replies from Keswick :

With all my heart and soul do I wish that you would put forth your strength in some efficient way. All those articles in the Review will do little till some thirty or forty years after you and I are both gone to visit our friends of the days before us. Then some political Peter Bayley will pick out all the golden threads with which you have embroidered such worthless canvass, to lace his own waistcoat.

'I see no Review but the Monthly, which is not worth seeing; no newspaper but the Whitehaven; no new books but the Annuals a good name for such deciduous productions; no society but an old East Indian general, with whom I, once in a month or so, play a rubber of whist. Am I the better or the worse for growing alone like a single oak? Growing to be sure I am, striking my roots deeper, and spreading out wider branches. I am historifying totis viribus [this was the History of Brazil]. Me judice, I am a good poet, but a better historian; because, though I read other poets and am humbled, I read other historians with a very different feeling. They who have talents want industry or virtue; they who have industry want talents. One writes like a French sensualist; another like a Scotch scoundrel, calculating how to make the most per sheet with the least expense of labor: one like a slave, another like a fool. Now I know myself to be free from these staminal defects, and feel that where the subject deserves it I write with a poet's feeling, without the slightest affectation of style or ornament, going always straight forward to the meaning by the shortest road. My golden rule is to relate every thing as briefly, as perspicuously, as rememberably as possible. I begin, however, to feel my brain budding for poetry, having lain fallow since November, and if I could afford to

death of the Snake-God, but I returned to my book soon, and finished it early in the evening. It is one of the great intellectual luxuries of my life, which I shall always remember, so to have

spent yesterday. I am satisfied with Madoc: I expected much, and am not disappointed. I put

...

the Iliad and the Jerusalem Delivered above Madoc; the Pharsalia and the Lusiad below Madoc: it approaches closely in rank and character and quality to the Odyssey, and is to sit in the peers with the Æneid, the Paradise Lost, and the Messiah, with a newer but not less wellearned patent of nobility. The manners are hardly mixed enough: almost every body is a real hero, with very fine feelings, notions, and sentiments; and this, whether he is a white or a red man, an educated bard or a runaway savage. There are some painters (Barry is one) who, having accustomed themselves while students at Rome to copy the antique statues frequently, are continually introducing into modern English figures the features and attitudes of the Apollo or the Laocoon, &c. Is there not in your ethic drawing a mannerism of this sort ?a perpetual tendency to copy a favorite ideal perfection, of which the absence of selfishness and warm sensibility constitute the contour and coloring?'

Keswick, April 9, 1805.

'My dear Friend, -There is that moral mannerism which you have detected: Thalaba is a male Joan of Arc; and Mr. Barbauld thought Joan of Arc was modelled upon the Socinian Christ. He was mistaken. Early admiration, almost adoration, of Leonidas, early principles of stoicism derived from the habitual study of Epictetus, and the French Revolution at its height when I was just eighteen, -by these my mind was moulded. But are not the characters in Madoc those which the circumstances would form? ....In classing Madoc in Wales with the historical plays of Shakspeare, you bestow the highest praise, and what I feel to be the most appropriate. It has the historical verisimilitude, and the dramatic truth. The other part, which is sui generis, you over and underrate. It is below Milton and Homer-infinitely below both, for both are unapproachably above my strength of wing; it is below Tasso in splendor and in structure of fable, above him in originality, and equal in feeling even to Spenser. With the others I will not admit comparison.

Virgil and Camoens are language-masters of is a short series of letter between Taylor and the first order-nothing more; and the "Mes- the late Dr. Robert Gooch-a physician siah"-pardon me if I say, that of what you ad- second to none of his age either in the learnmire in that poem, at least nine-tenths appear to

what I should produce for a mock heroic, and could produce with facility: there is one uniform substitution of bulk for sublimity.

me bubble, and bladder, and tympany-just ing or the practical skill of his profession, or in elegance of general accomplishments, or in kindness and generosity of spirit. Gooch, born in Taylor's neighborhood, completed his education at Edinburgh in the companionship of the younger Southey, and then established himself at Croydon, where he speedily earned such success and distinction as paved the way for a splendid, but too short, career in the metropolis. While at Croydon he had the misfortune to lose the wife of his youth, and Taylor addressed to him this letter :

The language is, I hope, pure English undefiled, always straightforward to the point; the style certainly my own, as much as is the bee's honey, for I read too little English poetry to catch the manner of any predecessor; it savors more of chronicles and romances, Spanish as well as English. I now think the second part wants similes in all its land-battles; and, if I continue to think so, will pour in learning enough, and bedeck it with diamonds from Golconda and gold from Ophir, with topazes from Brazil and amber from Scandinavia, the furs and feathers of the wild Indian, and the woven hair of the voluptuous Orientalist. You see I have recovered my state of desertion, and think at least as well of my poem and myself as any body else is likely to do.'

Yes, truly.-Mr. Southey made a run to Scotland in the winter of 1805-6, and we may pick a sentence or two from his letters, touching the society of Edinburgh, and his first impressions of the author of the Lay of the Last Minstrel :

:

The Scotch society disappointed me, as it needs must do a man who loves conversation instead of discussion. Of the three faculties of the mind, they seem exclusively to value judgment. They have nothing to teach, and a great deal more to learn than I should choose to be at the trouble of instructing them in.'

'I passed three days with Walter Scott, an amusing and highly estimable man. You see the whole extent of his powers in the "Minstrel's Lay," of which your opinion seems to accord with mine-a very amusing poem; it excites a novel-like interest, but you discover nothing on after-perusal. Scott bears a great part in the Edinburgh Review, but does not review well.'

'Norwich, Jan. 28, 1811.

'My dear, dear Friend, I feel for you-I weep at your loss-but am well aware that only the mother's sorrow can deserve the name of sympathy. "Twere a deficient consciousness of the excellence that is no more, not to pour out tears again and again before the imaged remembrance, not to wring the hands and call at times on the unanswering Emily. Grieve on. Where real merit is the subject of regret, there is justice in affliction, there is duty in lamentation, there is luxury in woe. It is an expression of that worship of the heart, now, alas! the only sentiment to bestow on the departed. Time is said to be the comforter of all. To you it would yet be a painful reflection to foresee that you too are doomed to cease to deplore. You would feel it as a profanation of the sacredness of your distress to look on it as finite.

Your daughter survives. In her education you will take a double solicitude, and will endeavor, as in her features so in her mind, to retrace that rare union of feeling and purity, of intellect and kindness, which marked her other parent. As the highest idea of feminine worth she may hope to realize, you will describe her mother to her, and accustom her to the imaginary presence of a superior being, whose frown was to have checked her every fault, whose smile of approbation was to have recompensed her sweetest virtues, whose example was to have fashioned her for the domestic charities. And thus the holy manes will still be the guardian angel of your household, and even here become what faith and hope have assured us she was to

The Edinburgh Review (in which Scott never bore a part of much consequence) was all along gall and wormwood at Keswick. When Taylor's version of 'Nathan the Wise' was published by itself (1806), it was criticised, it seems, by Mr. Jeffrey, and Southey be hereafter.

writes to Taylor in a strain of furious indig- 'How early you have quaffed the finest sweets

nation on the said Article. The mention of Taylor's name, which though not on the title-page, was not nor had ever been meant to be a secret, seemed to Southey an absolute crime. Taylor, who no doubt perceived that his friend's ire had been kindled by things nearer home than Nathan the Prosy, makes answer, I agree with Jeffrey in most things

about Nathan, and am well satisfied with his reviewal.'

Next to the correspondence with the poet of Keswick, the most striking in the book

and bitterest dregs of the draught of life! Youth and love handed you the matrimonial chalice, its brim smeared with honey; but disease shed poison in the cup, and to the intoxication of delight was to succeed the ravings of despairthe corse, the spectre, the veiling pall, the unrestoring tomb. You already know the utmost which fate can give or take away. Hope has no blandishments in store that can seduce, nor

Fear a threat that can appal.

With your disposition and temper these revolutions may improve the sensibility, and increase a benevolent zeal to defend others from such heart-rending separations, as it was not reserved

I was fully sensible to the feeling and the eloquence of your letter,-to your sympathy, your endeavors to impart some sweetness to the bitterness of my grief; but above all, to your eulogium on my departed wife. Indeed it was merited, and more than merited; for under aveil of modesty, so closely woven as to be utterly impenetrable to the eye of the world, was hidden an assemblage of virtues, which now one may look around for in -vol. ii. p. 336-338.

vain. You praise her, and praise her justly, for

her feeling and her purity; these perhaps lifted

her higher above her sex even than her other prompted by the stern realities of life, the virtues, for I confidently believe that a heart at best of mere literary correspondence must once so warm and so pure never beat before. But these were not all. She had an intellect needs appear of far inferior moment. We remarkable for its clearness and accuracy, al- draw to a close then-but must hazard one should live in cities; the leisure of the country ist. Strange, truly it is, to compare the spoils them. That bucolic contemplation of charitable spirit in which he tolerated the nature, which spends its ennui in watching for most flagrant heresies in a friend, with the

well for

a

monastic bitterness of his remarks and reflections concerning real or imagined errors in the conduct or opinions of any person, out of his own set, by whom he conceived the slightest liberty to have been taken with him in his literary capacity. Behold the dangers of living too much in a narrow circle, however virtuous, however refined, however accomplished.

hours the eyelet-holes of a rill's eddies, is very goatherd, and may grace an eclogue; but where fates of empires are at stake, the attention should not be invited to settle on any phenomena not stimulant enough to arrest the attention of a busy man. The engineer, who is sent to reconnoitre, is not to lose his time in zoologizing, entomologizing, botanizing, and picturesquizing, as Pelayo does on his way to Covadonga. I can at most concede to Homer that he may get his dinner. Your heroes never travel in seven-league boots, but rather à la If we look to what Taylor did, unques

tionably few are they who can be entitled to call him idle; but he was considered as eminently so by all who were qualified to compare what he did with what he might have

Humboldt. Wordsworth carries further than you the narratory manner, and the magnification of trifles, but you Wordsworthize too often. Another fault of the poem is its incessant religiosity. All the personages meet at prayers; all the heroes are monks in armor; all the done by Sayers especially, by Southey, and speeches are pulpit exhortations; all the favor- by himself. He knew himself well, and inites are reconciled to the church, and die with dicates with a charming frankness, half playthe comfort of absolution, as if, not the deliver- ful, half sad, in one letter to the laureate, that ance of Spain, but the salvation of the court, con- same weakness which made him so fond of stituted the action of the epopea. And in this

religiosity there is more of methodism and less predominating in provincial coteries and ju

venile clubs. 'The truth is,' he says, 'I have a childish and singular delight in seeing myself in print.' This is part of his complaint over the non-arrival of a Review, which

of idolatry than marked the Spanish catholicism of that era. Thirdly, there are too many women in the poem, and none of them very attaching, except perhaps Gaudiosa; the domestic affections occupy in consequence a preposterous space. Out included one of his articles on the prose of of a truly respectable puritanism you dislike to Milton. Brief and pregnant confession!

contemplate woman in the point of view in which she chiefly interests man. You rather carve a Vestal than a Venus, and in consequence your women want attraction; you take or mistake purity for beauty. Heroes are never very emi

nent for the domestic affections. While at home

they have a superfluous fondness for their wives during the age of beauty; in absence they console themselves with substitutes; and in later life, if they retain their vigor, they despotize

No wonder that Southey by and bye gives over his urgencies for the undertaking of a magnum opus. There remained for the poet such ejaculations as the following :

Time is stealing on us. The grey hairs begin to thicken on my head-more years have passed over yours; and it gives me a feeling, which if not exactly the heartache, is something akin to it, when I think what literary fortunes

over the old woman; if they become infirm, they will hereafter be made on your spoils, thoughts

seek the friendship of their nurse. But all this and illustrations pillaged, and systems extracted, is very excursive. I should have been glad if while the bibliographer who may chance to disyour topic had involved the marvellous, and had cover the real author, and come forward to vinemployed the hostile mythologies of the Catho- dicate his claim, must be content with a place lics and Moslems. Attributing to you still in some magazine or compilation of anecdotes greater scenic than dramatic force, and a more for an article with William Taylor for its headunrivalled power of picturesque than of ethic ing." delineation, the more your opera is a pièce à spectacle, the better etter; your machinery and illumination is always magically dazzling and brilliant."

The perfect freedom of these communications is, we apprehend, without any parallel in the history of men of letters; and the gentleness and candor with which Southey received his friend's analysis is most amiably unique throughout. His character was truly a lovable as well as a venerable one: yet it would be idle to dissemble that these memorials disclose many very strange weaknesses and inconsistencies in this best of recent His self-laudations are too often such as one would not wonder at in a dandy novel

- And for Taylor such echoes as this :

'At one time the mezerions of poetry stretch their purple fingers; at another, the hedge-row hawthorns of politics, limiting rights and wounding trespassers; at another, the high-darting, regularly-knotted, elastic, plastic bamboos of metaphysics; at another, the dark-wreathed simbul which strangles the cedar of superstition. Oh that, instead of this morbid versatility, I could persevere in some quiet incessant historic task!? -vol. ii. p. 298.

It is deeply interesting to compare the details of Southey's own daily life as a man of letters, which occur in this correspondence, with the foregoing and other similar confessions of Taylor. We have seen how the mis

cellanist of Norwich divided his day-how he relaxed in his evening. Southey says in 1807, and we know he might have said the same during thirty subsequent years,

'I cannot do one thing at a time: so sure as I attempt it, my health suffers. The business of the day haunts me in the night; and though a sound sleeper otherwise, my dreams partake so much of it as to harass and disturb me. I must always therefore have one train of thoughts for

higher faculties with which he was endowed for comparatively a small part of his day, and on tasks comparatively trivial, paid, much earlier in life, the penalty of his habitual indulgence in the conviviality of his hospitable and club-abounding Norwich. We have already heard of gout and others of the same 'painful family' which generous bachelors with whitening heads and darkening cheeks are so apt to be well endowed withal. By

the morning, another for the evening, and a the age of fifty, his biographer says, his book not relating to either for half an hour after friends observed with regret that but a few supper; and thus neutralizing one set of associations by another, and having (God be thank- glasses of wine sufficed to produce an extraed!) a heart at ease, I contrive to keep in order ordinary flow of spirits. His delicate hints a set of nerves as much disposed to be out of are quite enough to convey the impression order as any man's can be.'

that from that time Taylor continued to break down. His literary performances in

tions that give a very melancholy coloring to several of these chapters.

We believe that, from the same dread of dicated more and more the falling off of pith over-excitement in the composition of poetry, and fire; and year after year they were which made Johnson give over rhyme alto- fewer, and of less consequence in every gether, Mr. Southey allotted to that species respect though as age advanced, his pecuof work the first hours of his morning-never niary circumstances deteriorated; and his meddling with verse after breakfast: history, pen, if he had exercised it even as energeticor some grave treatise (most commonly, in ally as he did when he thought himself a rich later times, in the shape of an article for the man, might have enabled him, and those 'Quarterly'), occupied him during the best dearest to him, to escape troubles and vexapart of the forenoon. He worked in the large and beautiful room which contained his valuable library, until that overflowed into adjoining closets, and even passages; and he sat there at his desk, surrounded by his own family and the other relations who had found a home under his roof, undisturbed by their the remaining fortune sustained another heavy feminine occupations, well and worthily blow by the failure of some canal-share helped now and then by some of them in his speculations. After these new mishaps it own, till it was time for a short walk on the was hopeless to keep hidden what had prohill or a row on the lake; after which came bably long been guessed in a shrewd merthe simple meal, a mirthful hour or two of cantile community. A total change in the the easy chair, and social talk; and then, style of living was necessary-and William

with

The cup that cheers, but not inebriates,'

the resumption for what he calls half an hour, but in reality a much longer space, of some lighter employment, in which he could proceed without much consultation of authori

The repudiation losses were followed by several years of struggling between diminished means and reluctance to confess the fact by visible curtailment of expenditure; till

Taylor's pride made him suggest to his parents a removal from Norwich to some sequestered village retreat, where he was to have no society but theirs, and practice in his own person the abstinence which is no doubt easier than temperance in many cases, but hardly so to the inveterate diner-out of

from many passages in this book, among others an imitation of the Persicos odi by Dr. Sayers, composed in honor and glory of one favorite Norwich club, 'The Chips of Comfort:'

ties. Alas! even with all this carefulness of a place where dinners were at three o'clock, arrangement and subdivision, carried out and the established order of goings on for the amidst such prevailing innocence of heart rest of the evening such as may be inferred and habits, the demand made on the essentially poetical structure of nerve and brain was far too great: it could not be persisted in with impunity. Nay, in truth, his variation of tasks might have seemed as if he was in search of the over-excitement which he dreaded. There was a false and fatal stimulus in what he adopted as the substitute for repose. What a dreary twilight came after that bright day of rare genius and almost unparalleled diligence, we all know too well. But Mr. Taylor, though he exercised the

Dinners of form I vote a bore,
Where folks who never met before,
And care not if they ne'er meet more,

Are brought together;
Cramm'd close as mackerel in their places,
They eat with Chesterfieldian graces,
Drink healths, and talk with sapient faces

About the weather.