of a deathless reputation—considers his soreness to the least touch as a proof of his being in a whole skin, and his uneasiness to repel every attack as a proof of his being invulnerable. In a word, he mistakes an excess of spleen and irritability for the consciousness of innocence, and sets up his own egotism, vanity, ill-humour, and intolerance, as an answer in full to all the objections which have been brought against him of vanity, egotism, malignity, and intolerance. His "Letter" is a concentrated essence of a want of self-knowledge. It is the picture of the author's mind in little. In this respect, it is "a psychological curiosity;" a study of human infirmity. As some persons bequeath their bodies to the surgeons to be dissected after their death, Mr. Southey publicly exposes his mind to be anatomized while he is living. He lays open his character to the scalping-knife, guides the philosophic hand in its painful researches, and on the bald crown of our petit tondu in vain concealed under withered bay-leaves and a few contemptible grey hairs, you see the organ of vanity triumphant—sleek, smooth, round, perfect, polished, horned, and shining, as it were in a transparency. This is the handle of his intellect, the index of his mind; "the guide, the anchor of his purest thoughts, and soul of all his moral being;" the clue to the labyrinth of all his tergiversations and contradictions; the medius terminus of his political logic.
——"The ruling passion once express'd,
Wharton is plain, and Chartres stands confess'd."
Once admit that Mr. Southey is always in the right, and every one else in the wrong, and all the rest follows. This at once reconciles "Wat Tyler" and the "Quarterly Review," which Mr. William Smith took down to the House, in two different pockets for fear of a breach of the peace; identifies the poet of the "Joan of Arc" and of the "Annual Anthology" with the poet-laureate; and jumps the stripling into the man, whenever the latter has a mind to jump into a place or pension. Till you can deprive him of his personal identity, he will always be the same infallible per-
