the plans he proposed have been since adopted, and are now in active and beneficial operation, while kindlier feelings prevail between employers and employed, with a juster notion of their relative claims upon each other.
In the midst of these earnest endeavours for the public good, he was thunderstruck by reading in the papers an advertisement of the publication of "Wat Tyler," and received a copy of the drama in an envelope addressed to Robert Southey, Poet-Laureate and Renegade. This notorious production had been written in his hot youth, and thrown aside in neglect. It was now for the first time formally published through the disreputable contrivance of a dissenting minister; and so great was the sensation excited, and so cunningly had his adversaries watched their timeliest opportunity, that sixty thousand copies are reported to have been sold, and he became the daily theme of vituperation, calumny and abuse. Lord Brougham attacked him, with characteristic impetuosity, in the House of Commons; and a Mr. Smith, the member for Norwich, arming himself with a number of the "Quarterly" in one hand, and the obnoxious poem in the other, followed wrathfully and dully in the wake. An application was made to the Court of Chancery for an injunction to restrain the publication of the work; but Lord Eldon, considering that a person could not recover in damages for a work which is in its nature calculated to do an injury to the public, refused to grant it till Southey should have established his right to the property by an action at law. He accordingly left matters to take their course, well knowing that the trial of all things is in the end, but he abated not one jot of his ardour. Renegade, apostate, hireling, these were the epithets that were applied to his name. He, so poor and self-denying, was accused of heaping up wealth by the interested desertion of his principles. "The Edinburgh Review"
