Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/254

 Southey, the historian and the politician, at last discovered, that even this evil, the greatest and the only evil in the world, and not a mere illusion of his boyish imagination, is itself a bagatelle, compared with the blessings of the poll-tax, feudal vassalage, popery, and slavery, the attempt to put down which by murder, insurrection, and treason, in the reign of Richard II. the poet-laureate once celebrated con amore in "the Wat Tyler?"—In courtly malice and servility Mr. Southey has outdone Herodias's daughter. He marches into Chancery "with his own head in a charger," as an offering to Royal delicacy. He plucks out the heart of Liberty within him, and mangles his own breast to stifle every natural sentiment left there: and yet Mr. Coleridge would persuade us that this stuffed figure, this wretched phantom, is the living man. The finery of birth-day suits has dazzled his senses, so that he has "no speculation in those eyes that he does glare with;" yet Mr. Coleridge would persuade us that this is the clear-sighted politician. Famine stares him in the face, and he looks upon her with lack-lustre eye. Despotism hovers over him, and he says, "Come, let me clutch thee." He drinks the cup of human misery, and thinks it is a cup of sack. He has no feeling left, but of "tickling commodity;" no ears but for court whispers; no understanding but of his interest; no passion but his vanity. And yet they would persuade us that this non-entity is somebody—"the chief dread of Jacobins and Jacobinism, of quacks and quackery." If so, Jacobins and Jacobinism have not much to fear; and Mr. Coleridge may publish as many Lay Sermons as he pleases.

There is but one statement in the article in The Courier to which we can heartily assent; it is Mr. Southey's prediction of the fate of the French Revolution. "The Temple of Despotism," he said, "would be rebuilt, like that of the Mexican God, with human skulls, and cemented with human blood." He has lived to see this; to assist in the accomplishment of his prophecy, and to consecrate the spectre-building with pensioned hands!