is in a literary sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a little
astonished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable political
satire as the _Anti-Jacobin_, should have been so much taken as it
seems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy sarcasm
of the _Devil's Thoughts_. The poem created something like a
_furore_, and sold a large reissue of the number of the _Morning
Post_ in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical point
of view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most smoothly-
flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is nothing in
its boisterous political drollery to put its composition beyond the reach
of any man of strong partisan feelings and a turn for street-humour.
_Fire Famine and Slaughter_, on the other hand, is literary in
every sense of the word, requiring indeed, and very urgently, to insist
on its character as literature, in order to justify itself against the
charge of inhuman malignity. Despite the fact that "letters four do
form his name," it is of course an idealised statesman, and not the
real flesh and blood Mr. Pitt, whom the sister furies, Fire, Famine,
and Slaughter, extol as their patron in these terrible lines. The poem
must be treated as what lawyers call an "A. B. case." Coleridge must be
supposed to be lashing certain alphabetical symbols arranged in a
certain order. This idealising process is perfectly easy and familiar
to everybody with the literary sense. The deduction for "poetic
license" is just as readily, though it does not, of course, require to
be as frequently, made with respect to the hyperbole of denunciation as
with respect to that of praise. Nor need we doubt that this deduction
had in fact been made by all intelligent readers long before that
agitating dinner at Mr. Sotheby's, which Coleridge describes with such
anxious gravity in his apologetic preface to the republication of the
lines. On the whole one may pretty safely accept De Quincey's view of
the true character of this incident as related by him in his own