temptation of plunging into the notes in which the epic poet gives his authorities. Southey's reading had made him familiar with much that is now called 'Folk-lore,' and I turn from an affecting incident in the Tale of Paraguay to follow his remarks upon the curious custom of the 'couvade,' or from a tremendous fight of Madoc with a sacred serpent, to read an account of 'the wonderful docility of the snake.' The reader of an epic poem is clearly not in the right mood when he is accessible to such temptations; and he infers, rightly perhaps, that the writer must have been equally below the imaginative tension necessary for success. In fact, an 'epic poem' was already an anachronism; though Southey tells us that all clever young men in his day hoped to produce epic poems. I do not know what they want to produce now—something, perhaps, which will seem as absurd a century hence. Anyhow, we are content to pass Southey's poems with the admission that they are not so unreadable as Glover's Leonidas, or Wilkie's Epigoniad. The characteristic point is Southey's complacent and indomitable faith in his own performances. There is something sublime in his self-confidence. He commends the judicious critic who had said that
