Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/390

376 attacked him. "The Morning Chronicle" ranted about "his impious and blasphemous obscenities;" and he was esteemed so formidable an antagonist, that Cobbett proscribed him by name, as one of the persons who, when the radicals should have effected a reformation, were, as one of the first measures of the new government, to be executed!

About this time, through some informality in an uncle's testament, he was the loser of an estate of the estimated value of £1000 a-year. Twice before the wanton caprice of testators had deprived him of property which the law, had it been allowed to take its course, would have given him as heir; and now the law interposed to take away an estate which the bequest of a relative would have conferred.

At the Oxford commemoration, in 1820, he received the honorary degree of LL.D. from the University, and never was honour better merited. His writings in defence of the Established Church had been effective and opportune. That, with all other institutions, had been fiercely attacked, not through any desire to reform, but in the wanton lust to destroy; and Southey, whose wildest boyish dreams had had for their end the amelioration of society, could not tolerate the raving atheism which struggled to confound vice and virtue, good and evil, in one wide and lawless anarchy. After the ceremony at the theatre, and a collation at Brasenose, given by the Vice-Chancellor, he took a solitary walk in Christ Church meadow, where he had not been for six-and-twenty years. He describes the day as one of the most melancholy of his life, and so it may well have been. There, where revisiting the haunts of yesterday, we pace the cloisters, and meet only unknown faces, while strange names over the well-known doors arrest one's almost mechanical ingress; how glaring the change wrought by a quarter of a century! He looked up