they's consistency and moderation. All this is strange, but not new to our readers. We have said it all before. Why does Mr. Southey oblige us to repeat the accusation, by furnishing us with fresh proofs of it? He is betrayed to his ruin by trusting to the dictates of his personal feelings and wounded pride; and yet he dare not look at his situation through any other medium. "To know my deed, 't were best not know myself." But does he expect all eyes as well as his to be "blind with the pin and web?" Does he pull his laurel-crown as a splendid film over his eyes, and expect us to join in a game of political blindman's-buff with him, with a "Hoop, do me no harm, good man?" Are we not to cry out while an impudent, hypocritical, malignant renegado is putting his gag in our mouths, and getting his thumbscrews ready? "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale," says Sir Toby to the fantastical steward Malvolio? Does Mr. Southey think, because he is a pensioner, that he is to make us willing slaves? While he goes on writing in the "Quarterly," shall we give over writing in The Examiner? Before he puts down the liberty of the press, the press shall put him down, with all his hireling and changeling crew. In the servile war which Mr. Southey tells us is approaching, the service we have proposed to ourselves to do is, to neutralize the servile intellect of the country. This we have already done in part, and hope to make clear work of it, before we have done.—For example:
This heroic epistle to William Smith, Esq. from Robert Southey, sets off in the following manner:—
"Sir,—You are represented in the newspapers as having entered, during an important discussion in parliament, into a comparison between certain passages in the "Quarterly Review," and the opinions which were held by the author of "Wat Tyler" three-and-twenty years ago. It appears farther, according to the same authority, that the introduction of so strange a criticism, in so strange a place, did not arise from the debate, but was a premeditated thing; that you had prepared yourself for it, by stowing
