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Rh to the windows of his old rooms at Balliol. Of those who had so frequently assembled there in disputatious converse, some were dead, and all were scattered; and he too, how altered from what he was! The melancholy strain emanating from internal causes is almost the first we hear through his history. He had reached the zenith of his course. The exultation of hope was abating; and his eye now turned, not upwards, but toward the gathering shadows of the evening.

It was about this time the quarrel with Lord Byron reached its acme. In 1819 the two first cantos of "Don Juan" had been published, but the dedication was repressed. It, however, got into print, and was hawked about the streets of London. Southey, in the preface to his "Vision of Judgment," made a severe attack on the doctrine and the writings of a class of authors, of whom Lord Byron was the most eminent, and the most influential. In an article in the "Quarterly," speaking incidentally of the Jungfrau, he said it was the place where Manfred met the devil and bullied him. Lord Byron was nettled, and retaliated. Southey replied by a letter in "The Courier," (5th of June, 1822). His opponent, who was then residing at Pisa, forwarded a challenge to England, which his friend Douglas Kinnaird had the good sense to retain, and the circumstance was never communicated to Southey. It was a quarrel between the petulant spleen of Lord Byron, and the outraged moral feelings of the British public, speaking through Southey. The former was the aggressor throughout, and there can be no doubt on which side was the right; but unfortunately Southey, by his egregious self-pretension, laid himself open to much of the sarcasm which, by its liveliness and force, still excites a smile during the perusal.

During the summer of the year following that of his visit to Oxford, he stayed a few weeks at Netherall the seat of