It is exactly what we should expect from a stern old Benedictine, who had been preserved from many ordinary frailties by the restraints of his situation.  No man out of a cloister ever wrote about love, for example, so coldly and at the same time so grossly.  His descriptions of it are just what we should hear from a recluse who knew the passion only from the details of the confessional.  Almost all his heroes make love either like Seraphim or like cattle.  He seems to have no notion of any thing between the Platonic passion of the Glendoveer who gazes with rapture on his mistress’s leprosy, and the brutal appetite of Arvalan and Roderick.  In Roderick, indeed, the two characters are united.  He is first all clay, and then all spirit.  He goes forth a Tarquin, and comes back too ethereal to be married.  The only love scene, as far as we can recollect, in Madoc, consists of the delicate attentions which a savage, who has drunk too much of the Prince’s excellent metheglin, offers to Goervyl.  It would be the labour of a week to find, in all the vast mass of Mr. Southey’s poetry, a single passage indicating any sympathy with those feelings which have consecrated the shades of Vaucluse and the rocks of Meillerie.

Indeed, if we except some very pleasing images of paternal tenderness and filial duty, there is scarcely any thing soft or humane in Mr. Southey’s poetry.  What theologians call the spiritual sins are his cardinal virtues, hatred, pride, and the insatiable thirst of vengeance.  These passions he disguises under the name of duties; he purifies them from the alloy of vulgar interests; he ennobles them by uniting them with energy, fortitude, and a severe sanctity of manners; and he then holds them up to the admiration of mankind.  This is the spirit of Thalaba, of Ladurlad, of Adosinda, of Roderick after his conversion.  It is the spirit which, in all his writings, Mr. Southey appears to affect.  “I do well to be angry,” seems to be the predominant feeling of his mind.  Almost the only mark of charity which he vouchsafes to his opponents is to pray for their reformation; and this he does in terms not unlike those in which we can imagine a Portuguese priest interceding with Heaven for a Jew, delivered over to the secular arm after a relapse.

We have always heard, and fully believe, that Mr. Southey is a very amiable and humane man; nor do we intend to apply to him personally any of the remarks which we have made on the spirit of his writings.  Such are the caprices of human nature.  Even Uncle Toby troubled himself very little about the French grenadiers who fell on the glacis of Namur.  And Mr. Southey, when he takes up his pen, changes his nature as much as Captain Shandy, when he girt on his sword.  The only opponents to whom the Laureate gives quarter are those in whom he finds something of his own character reflected.  He seems to have an instinctive antipathy for calm, moderate men, for men who shun extremes, and who render reasons.  He treated Mr. Owen of Lanark, for example, with infinitely more respect than he has shown to Mr. Hallam or to Dr. Lingard; and this for no reason that we can discover, except that Mr. Owen is more unreasonably and hopelessly in the wrong than any speculator of our time.