happiness, his confidence in his fellow-man, when all else despair.  It is the very element, “where he must live or have no life at all.”  While he supposed it possible that a better form of society could be introduced than any that had hitherto existed, while the light of the French Revolution beamed into his soul (and long after, it was seen reflected on his brow, like the light of setting suns on the peak of some high mountain, or lonely range of clouds, floating in purer ether!) while he had this hope, this faith in man left, he cherished it with child-like simplicity, he clung to it with the fondness of a lover, he was an enthusiast, a fanatic, a leveller; he stuck at nothing that he thought would banish all pain and misery from the world—­in his impatience of the smallest error or injustice, he would have sacrificed himself and the existing generation (a holocaust) to his devotion to the right cause.  But when he once believed after many staggering doubts and painful struggles, that this was no longer possible, when his chimeras and golden dreams of human perfectibility vanished from him, he turned suddenly round, and maintained that “whatever is, is right.”  Mr. Southey has not fortitude of mind, has not patience to think that evil is inseparable from the nature of things.  His irritable sense rejects the alternative altogether, as a weak stomach rejects the food that is distasteful to it.  He hopes on against hope, he believes in all unbelief.  He must either repose on actual or on imaginary good.  He missed his way in Utopia, he has found it at Old Sarum—­

  “His generous ardour no cold medium knows:” 

his eagerness admits of no doubt or delay.  He is ever in extremes, and ever in the wrong!

The reason is, that not truth, but self-opinion is the ruling principle of Mr. Southey’s mind.  The charm of novelty, the applause of the multitude, the sanction of power, the venerableness of antiquity, pique, resentment, the spirit of contradiction have a good deal to do with his preferences.  His inquiries are partial and hasty:  his conclusions raw and unconcocted, and with a considerable infusion of whim and humour and a monkish spleen.  His opinions are like certain wines, warm and generous when new; but they will not keep, and soon turn flat or sour, for want of a stronger spirit of the understanding to give a body to them.  He wooed Liberty as a youthful lover, but it was perhaps more as a mistress than a bride; and he has since wedded with an elderly and not very reputable lady, called Legitimacy. A wilful man, according to the Scotch proverb, must have his way.  If it were the cause to which he was sincerely attached, he would adhere to it through good report and evil report; but it is himself to whom he does homage, and would have others do so; and he therefore changes sides, rather than submit to apparent defeat or temporary mortification.  Abstract principle has no rule but the understood