(_Edinburgh Review_, January 1830.)
It {132}would be scarcely possible for a man of Mr. Southey’s talents
and acquirements to write two volumes so large as those before us, which
should be wholly destitute of information and amusement. Yet we do not
remember to have read with so little satisfaction any equal quantity
of matter, written by any man of real abilities. We have, for some time
past, observed with great regret the strange infatuation which leads
the Poet Laureate to abandon those departments of literature in which he
might excel, and to lecture the public on sciences of which he has still
the very alphabet to learn. He has now, we think, done his worst. The
subject which he has at last undertaken to treat is one which demands
all the highest intellectual and moral qualities of a philosophical
statesman, an understanding at once comprehensive and acute, a heart
at once upright and charitable. Mr. Southey brings to the task two
faculties which were never, we believe, vouchsafed in measure so copious
to any human being, the faculty of believing without a reason, and the
faculty of hating without a provocation.
(1) _Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and
Prospects of Society_. By Robert Southey, Esq., LL.D., Poet
Laureate. 2 vols. 8vo, London: 1829.
{133}It is, indeed, most extraordinary, that a mind like Mr. Southey’s,
a mind richly endowed in many respects by nature, and highly cultivated
by study, a mind which has exercised considerable influence on the most
enlightened generation of the most enlightened people that ever existed,
should be utterly destitute of the power of discerning truth from
falsehood. Yet such is the fact. Government is to Mr. Southey one of the
fine arts. He judges of a theory, of a public measure, of a religion or
a political party, of a peace or a war, as men judge of a picture or
a statue, by the effect produced on his imagination. A chain of
associations is to him what a chain of reasoning is to other men; and
what he calls his opinions are in fact merely his tastes.
This description might perhaps apply to a much greater man,
Mr. Burke. But Mr. Burke assuredly possessed an understanding admirably
fitted for the investigation of truth, an understanding stronger than
that of any statesman, active or speculative, of the eighteenth century,
stronger than every thing, except his own fierce and ungovernable
sensibility. Hence he generally chose his side like a fanatic, and
defended it like a philosopher. His conduct on the most important
occasions of his life, at the time of the impeachment of Hastings for
example, and at the time of the French Revolution, seems to have been
prompted by those feelings and motives which Mr. Coleridge has so
happily described,
“Stormy pity, and the cherish’d lure