in an oak; and it is not for those who have haunted the same regions to complain if he is a trifle too 'bookish.' Southey, I must confess, went a bit too far when he took his walks with a book in his hands. I abhor such a practice. It is as bad as smoking a pipe in church; it savours of profanity to the real lovers of walks, and suggests that Southey really liked even mountains better on paper than in reality. One must, however, forgive something to a thoroughbred monomaniac; and if Southey's talk, as De Quincey reports, ran too much upon literature and too little upon life, it meant no indifference or blindness to actual events, only an acquired necessity of looking at them through his accustomed spectacles. To read the Doctor is to spend an hour with Southey in his library; and, if here and there to be a little overdosed with an author's pedantry, yet to be made aware of his domestic charm. There was a nursery in his house as well as a library; and the Three Bears must have been told to the precocious boy whose early death almost broke his father's heart. Daniel Dove, his hero, is not an Uncle Toby, but he sufficiently reflects the generous and chivalrous characteristics of his creator.
