6th and lastly. "Mr. Southey's darling poet from his childhood was Edmund Spenser, from whom, next to the spotless purity of his own moral habits, he learned that reverence for
———"constant chastity,
Unspotted faith, and comely womanhood,
Regard of honour and mild modesty."
"And we are strongly persuaded that the indignation which, in his early perusal of our history, the outrage on Wat Tyler's Daughter had kindled within him, was the circumstance that recommended the story to his choice for the first powerful exercise of his dramatic powers. It is this, too, we doubt not, that coloured and shaped his feelings during the whole composition of the drama.
"Through the allegiance and just fealty
Which he did owe unto all womankind."
Mr. Coleridge might as well tell us that the Laureate wrote Wat Tyler as an Epithalamium on his own marriage. There is but one line on the subject from the beginning to the end. No; it is not Mr. Southey's way to say nothing on the subject on which he writes. If this were the main drift and secret spring of the poem, why does Mr. Southey wish to retract it now? Has he been taught by his present fashionable associates to laugh at Edmund Spenser, the darling of the boy Southey, to abjure "his allegiance and just fealty to all womankind," and to look upon "rapes and ravishments" as "exaggerated evils," the product of an idle imagination, exciting a pleasurable fervour at the time, and signifying nothing afterwards? Is the outrage upon Wat Tyler's Daughter the only evil in history, or in the poem itself, which ought to inflame the virtuous indignation of the full-grown stripling bard? Are all the other oppressions recorded in the annals of the world nothing but "horrible shadows, unreal mockeries," that this alone should live "within the book and volume of his brain unmixed with baser matter?" Or has Mr.
