First then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general
reception of his earlier publications; namely, the poems published
with Mr. Lovell under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two volumes
of poems under his own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures of the
critics by profession are extant, and may be easily referred to:--
careless lines, inequality in the merit of the different poems, and
(in the lighter works) a predilection for the strange and whimsical;
in short, such faults as might have been anticipated in a young and
rapid writer, were indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was there at that
time wanting a party spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who
with all the courage of uncorrupted youth had avowed his zeal for a
cause, which he deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of
oppression by whatever name consecrated. But it was as little objected
by others, as dreamed of by the poet himself, that he preferred
careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or indeed that
he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction, except that
which we may all learn from Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable
dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally attributed to Tacitus, or Strada's
Prolusions; if indeed natural good sense and the early study of the
best models in his own language had not infused the same maxims more
securely, and, if I may venture the expression, more vitally. All that
could have been fairly deduced was, that in his taste and estimation
of writers Mr. Southey agreed far more with Thomas Warton, than with
Dr. Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny, that at all times Mr. Southey was
of the same mind with Sir Philip Sidney in preferring an excellent
ballad in the humblest style of poetry to twenty indifferent poems
that strutted in the highest. And by what have his works, published
since then, been characterized, each more strikingly than the
preceding, but by greater splendour, a deeper pathos, profounder
reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of metre?