over his conceit. Wordsworth's estimate of his own merits was confirmed in the main by the next generation, and Southey's became the object of ridicule. Was not the same moral quality implied in both cases? and why should Southey be blamed for taking his ardent love of literature for a proof of supreme literary genius? Ten people must try if one is to succeed. Great, at any rate, must be the comfort of such a possession. Vanity, like sleep, 'wraps a man round like a cloak'; it is the natural armour which fits the man of letters for the struggle of existence. Some authors may be simply 'pachydermatous,' though that is a quality which scarcely fits the true literary temperament. Southey, highly strung, sensitive, and ardent, was gifted with that falcon nose and that superlative self-esteem to comfort and support him through failure and obloquy, and the protracted struggle to make both ends meet. Nothing less could have kept up his spirits through his hard-fought career. 'My natural spirits,' he says in 1819, 'are buoyant beyond those of any person, man, woman, or child, whom I ever saw or heard of.' This 'vanity,' self-esteem, or whatever we please to call it, is simply one aspect of the indomitable buoyancy which enabled him to do some really
