wanted, to take advantage of the efforts of such illustrious workmen, and raise an edifice, which will be the harbinger of union, independence, and regeneration, to that unfortunate people. The efforts the Italians of our days are making for a unity of language, literature, and history, are the best pledge they can give, of their being fitted for their emancipation. It is always by such a wise gradation, that the productions of arts, letters, and science, as well as the works of nature, are advanced to their greatest results.

The plan for the erection of the greatest of temples had long since been modelled and remodelled; the treasures of more than one Pope had been lavished; winters and summers had revolved over the rising aisles for more than half a century, before the Vatican felt the first impulse of that hand that was to start it into existence, before, leaning upon the unwieldy piles heaped up by his predecessors, and taking his model from the works of creation, Michel Angelo raised to the firmament a firmament of marble.

ART. II. The Poetical Works of ROBERT SOUTHEY, collected by Himself. In Ten Volumes. 16mo. London. 1837, 1838.

NONE of the elegant republications of the day have given us greater pleasure than this; the rather, as it is not a monument to the memory of its eminent author, but has been undertaken by himself, at the beginning of his old age, as a suitable close of his long literary life."At the age of sixtythree," he says, "I have undertaken to collect and revise my poetical works." Of those sixty-three years, he has passed forty-four in the public presence, as an active and voluminous author. His literary life thus covers more than a complete generation of men, and has witnessed the beginning and the ending of more than one of those distinguished lives, which have made the nineteenth century famous. During this period, Byron and Mrs. Hemans, to name no more, achieved their whole work of immortality, and even Walter Scott ran his entire race, having made his first publication some years after Southey's reputation was established.

So the laureate has stood, like some steady light in the heavens, while stars and meteors have risen and fallen around him. The older and the younger are gone, and he still lives, with a smooth brow and untremulous hand, not an old man though an old author, to set his works in order by a leisurely revision, and bring his poetical existence to a dignified conclusion.

It is a spectacle of peculiar interest. Excepting Scott, Southey has been the most prolific of the distinguished writers of his time, and, perhaps without exception, the author who has written successfully on the greatest diversity of subjects, from the most trivial to the most important, from the lightest to the most grave. Equally at home in literature, theology, and politics; an historian, biographer, critic, poet, essayist, and polemic; allowed on all hands to be one of the few masters of English prose, and second to few of the great names of modern English poetry; often offending in matters of taste, but never untrue to moral purity and religious faith; bigoted as a politician and a theologian, in both which characters he had forsaken the opinions and connexions of his youth, but liberal as a man, notwithstanding his violence as a partisan; always before the public eye as an author, but living in beautiful retirement from the world, in his own domestic and scholarly retreat; he is a man whom, in some features of his character, we could wish other than he is, but whose intrinsic worth commands respect. We cannot refuse to see that he is unequal, inconsistent, often puerile, sometimes absurd; but he is always conscientious, never forgetful of moral obligation, and occasionally great. If it were inquired who, among the distinguished men of modern letters, has written the silliest things, we should answer, with little hesitation, Southey; if asked, who among them has written the greatest, it would not be without a pause and a struggle, that we should prevail on ourselves to dismiss his claim. We are confident, that he has not yet received the measure of reputation which is his due. In the crowd of admirable works, which, during his career, have jostled each other in their claims for regard, the reading public have allowed their impatience at the littlenesses and the vexatious violations of good taste, which annoyed them in the self-complacent volumes of the bard of Keswick, to divert their attention from his sterling merits. Yet he has not wanted readers and ad

mirers. Some of his writings have been extensively popular; and we are confident, that this complete collection of his poetical works will find a hearty welcome, and will increase the number of his readers.

We should have been better satisfied with an edition of his poems, from which were excluded all the questionable trivialities of his earlier as well as his later days. But he republishes the whole, insisting, in one of his prefaces, that there is not a line which dying he should be ashamed of, and wish to blot; and, in another, acknowledging that some of the pieces might more fitly be destroyed than reprinted; "not," he says, "for any disgrace which could be reflected upon him by the crude compositions of his youth, nor for any harm which they could possibly do the reader; but, merely, that they might not cumber the collection." He retains them in this edition, simply because, having been once published, "pirated editions would hold out as a recommendation, that they contained what he had chosen to suppress," and it was prudent to forestall that evil by reprinting them himself.

Agreeing with him, that the poems to which he refers had better been "consigned to the flames," we think, too, that he has done right in not excluding them from the present collection; but we are not so easily satisfied with his course in regard to the correction of his earlier works. His method is, to arrange the pieces, as far as possible, in the order in which they were written, for the reason, that "such order is useful to those who read critically, and desire to trace the progress of an author's mind in his writings ;" yet he adopts. a rule in the revision of his juvenile works, which contradicts this purpose. "From these," he says, "the faults of diction have been weeded, wherever it could be done without more trouble than the composition originally cost, and than the piece itself was worth." And, as regards one of them, "Joan of Arc," he tells us, that it has now been corrected throughout,

"for the purpose of making it more consistent with itself in diction, and less inconsistent in other things with the wellweighed opinions of my maturer years. The faults of effort, which may generally be regarded as hopeful indications in a juvenile writer, have been mostly left as they were. The faults

of language, which remained from the first edition, have been removed, so that in this respect the whole is sufficiently in keeping. And for those which expressed the political prejudices of a young man, who had too little knowledge to suspect his own ignorance, they have either been expunged, or altered, or such substitutions have been made for them as harmonize with the pervading spirit of the poem, and are nevertheless in accord with those opinions which the author has maintained for thirty years, through good and evil report, in the maturity of his judgment as well as in the sincerity of his heart."

We certainly do not perceive how such thorough correction as this, extending both to "diction and opinions," can leave the work in a condition to aid those who read critically, and desire to trace the progress of the author's mind." We have not been at the pains to collate the present with the earlier editions, and therefore cannot say, how far changes have been made; but it is clear, that the author has deliberately adopted a course, which deprives the chronological arrangement of his works of a large portion of its usefulness. How are we to judge of "the progress of an author's mind," if his early productions are altered by him in mature life, so as to conform to the opinions which he then holds ?

It is not, however, to all his juvenile pieces that this correcting process has been applied. The most celebrated, perhaps we should say notorious, of them, "Wat Tyler," composed at the age of nineteen, when his blood was hot with republican principles, and, after he had renounced them, freely used as a weapon of annoyance by his political adversaries, is here reprinted, partly in the spirit of bravado, just as it was written. The publication of this "notable drama " was at first made surreptitiously, twenty years after it was written. It obtained a far greater notoriety, through incidental circumstances, than its intrinsic merit or demerit could warrant; and posterity will wonder at the extreme acrimony exhibited in the writings of the parties, who waged a warfare of petty personal annoyance and spite, on account of so ordinary a performance. The secret is found in the fact, that

They may be judged of, we suppose, from the omission, which we have just now accidentally noticed, of this line;

"La Fayette, name that Freedom still shall love."

the deadliest enmity is that of a party, which seeks to revenge apostasy; as Southey says, "gentlemen thought proper to revile me, not for having entertained democratic opinions, but for having outgrown them." And he faces down the shame which they attempt to fix upon him, by printing the obnoxious thing, "just as it was written in the course of three mornings, in 1794; the stolen copy, which was committed to the press twenty-three years afterwards, not having undergone the slightest correction of any kind ;" and this he does, "that it may not be supposed I think it any reproach to have written it, or that I am more ashamed of having been a republican, than of having been a boy." This is capitally said; but the tetchiness and virulence of his political feelings give sometimes an apparent contradiction to this cool assertion of indifference.

Another of his pieces, equally notorious with "Wat Tyler," though in a different way, makes its appearance under very different treatment, and in a manner somewhat instructive as to one side of our author's character. Everybody has read "The Devil's Walk," which has been printed and reprinted, times without number, as Professor Porson's. The pith and piquancy of some of the stanzas are sufficient to account for its popularity. It seems, however, that there was blunder or mystification in the affair. Coleridge printed the verses among his works, under the title of "The Devil's Thoughts;" assigning five of the stanzas to Southey, and claiming for himself the remaining twelve. But the authorship was still obstinately attributed to Porson, until declared to be Southey's, in a newspaper correspondence, which is quoted in these volumes and adopted as the truth. The lines, it is said, "were written by Mr. Southey one morning before breakfast, the idea having struck him while shaving; they were subsequently shown to Mr. Coleridge, who, we believe, pointed some of the stanzas, and perhaps added one or two." This account is clearly irreconcilable with that of Coleridge, and leaves us entirely puzzled as to what is the fact. Is it possible, that both of these great men deceived themselves, and misremembered? At any rate, here it appears with our author's mark on it; but in such a questionable shape, that we are disposed to address it in the words

* Vol. II. p. 83.