He answers to Mandeville’s description of Addison, “a parson in a tye-wig.”  He is not a boon companion, nor does he indulge in the pleasures of the table, nor in any other vice; nor are we aware that Mr. Southey is chargeable with any human frailty but—­want of charity!  Having fewer errors to plead guilty to, he is less lenient to those of others.  He was born an age too late.  Had he lived a century or two ago, he would have been a happy as well as blameless character.  But the distraction of the time has unsettled him, and the multiplicity of his pretensions have jostled with each other.  No man in our day (at least no man of genius) has led so uniformly and entirely the life of a scholar from boyhood to the present hour, devoting himself to learning with the enthusiasm of an early love, with the severity and constancy of a religious vow—­and well would it have been for him if he had confined himself to this, and not undertaken to pull down or to patch up the State!  However irregular in his opinions, Mr. Southey is constant, unremitting, mechanical in his studies, and the performance of his duties.  There is nothing Pindaric or Shandean here.  In all the relations and charities of private life, he is correct, exemplary, generous, just.  We never heard a single impropriety laid to his charge; and if he has many enemies, few men can boast more numerous or stauncher friends.—­The variety and piquancy of his writings form a striking contrast to the mode in which they are produced.  He rises early, and writes or reads till breakfast-time.  He writes or reads after breakfast till dinner, after dinner till tea, and from tea till bed-time—­

  “And follows so the ever-running year
  With profitable labour to his grave—­”

on Derwent’s banks, beneath the foot of Skiddaw.  Study serves him for business, exercise, recreation.  He passes from verse to prose, from history to poetry, from reading to writing, by a stop-watch.  He writes a fair hand, without blots, sitting upright in his chair, leaves off when he comes to the bottom of the page, and changes the subject for another, as opposite as the Antipodes.  His mind is after all rather the recipient and transmitter of knowledge, than the originator of it.  He has hardly grasp of thought enough to arrive at any great leading truth.  His passions do not amount to more than irritability.  With some gall in his pen, and coldness in his manner, he has a great deal of kindness in his heart.  Rash in his opinions, he is steady in his attachments—­and is a man, in many particulars admirable, in all respectable—­his political inconsistency alone excepted!

* * * * *

MR. T. MOORE.—­MR. LEIGH HUNT.

  “Or winglet of the fairy humming-bird,
  Like atoms of the rainbow fluttering round.”

  CAMPBELL.