cantos of contemned love, and sing them loud even in the dead of the night!" He indeed assures us in the "Quarterly Review," that the Inquisition was restored by the voice of the Spanish people. He also asks, in the same place, "whether the voice of God was heard in the voice of the people at Jerusalem, when they cried, 'Crucify him, crucify him?'" We do not know; but we suppose, he would hardly go to the Chief Priests and Pharisees to find it. This great historian, politician, and logician, breaks out into a rhapsody against the old maxim, vox populi vox Dei, in the midst of an article of 55 pages, written expressly to prove that the last war was "the most popular, because the most just and necessary war that ever was carried on," He shrewdly asks, "Has the vox populi been the vox Dei in France for the last twenty-five years?" But, at least, according to his own shewing, it has been so in this country for all that period. We, however, do not think so. The voice of the country has been for war, because the voice of the King was for it, which was echoed by Parliament, both Lords and Commons, by Clergy and Gentry, and by the populace, till, as Mr. Southey himself states in the same connected chain of reasoning, the cry for war became so popular, that all those who did not join in it (of which number the Poet-laureate himself was one) were "persecuted, insulted, and injured in their persons, fame, and fortune." This is the true way of accounting for the fact, but it unfortunately knocks the Poet's inference on the head. Mr. Locke has observed, that there are not so many wrong opinions in the world as we are apt to believe, because most people take their opinions on trust from others. Neither are the opinions of the people their own, when they have been bribed or bullied into them by a mob of Lords and Gentlemen, following in full cry at the heels of the Court. The vox populi is the vox Dei only when it springs from the individual, unbiassed feelings, and unfettered, independent opinion of the people. Mr. Southey does not understand the terms of this good old adage, now that he is so furious against it: we fear, he understood them no better when he was as loudly in favour of it.
