abroad; and, as long as it continues to be read, so long is he the pander of posterity, and so long is he heaping up guilt upon his soul in perpetual accumulation.

These remarks are not more severe than the offence deserves, eveu when applied to those immoral writers who have not been conscious of any evil intention in their writings, who would acknowledge a little levity, a little warmth of colouring, and so forth, in that sort of language with which men gloss over their favorite vices, and deceive themselves. What then should be said of those for whom the thoughtlessness and inebriety of wanton youth can no longer be pleaded, but who have written in sober manhood and with deliberate purpose?-men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and, hating that revealed religion, which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul! The school which they have set up may properly be called the Satanic school; for though their productions breathe the spirit of Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those loathsome images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to represent, they are more especially characterized by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feeling of hopelessness wherewith it is allied.

This evil is political as well as moral, for indeed moral and political evils are inseparably connected. Truly has it been affirmed, by one of our ablest and clearest reasoners, that "the destruction of governments may be proved and deduced from the general corruption of the subjects' manners, as a direct and natural cause thereof, by a demoustration as certain as any in the mathematics." There is no maxim more frequently enforced by Machiavelli, than that, where the manners of a people are generally corrupted, there the government cannot long subsist, a truth which all history exemplifies; and there is no means whereby that corruption can be so surely and rapidly diffused as by poisoning the waters of literature.

Let rulers of the state look to this in time! But, to use the words of South, if "our physicians think the best way of curing a disease is to pamper it, the Lord in mercy prepare the kingdom to suffer what He by miracle only can prevent."

'No apology is offered for these remarks. The subject led to them;

and the occasion of introducing them was willingly taken, because it is the duty of every one, whose opinion may have any influence, to expose the drift and aim of those writers who are laboring to subvert the foundations of human virtue and of human happiness.'

Under this merited castigation Lord Byron seems to have smarted soundly; and, as he was not much in the practice of putting up tamely with any attack, he took his revenge upon Mr. Southey in the appendix to the Two Foscari'-a tragedy which he published soon afterwards. This seply we must also give, in justice to the parties litigant:

Mr. Southey, in his pious preface to a poem whose blasphemy is as harmless as the sedition of "Wat Tyler," because it is equally absurd with that sincere production, calls upon the "legislature to look to it,” as the toleration of such writings led to the French revolution: not such writings as "Wat Tyler," but as those of the "Satanic school." This is not true, and Mr. Southey knows it to be not true. Every French writer of any freedom was persecuted; Voltaire and Rousseau were exiles, Marmontel and Diderot were sent to the Bastile, and a perpetual war was waged with the whole class by the existing despotism. In the next place the French revolution was not occasioned by any writings whatsoever, but must have occurred had no such writers ever existed. It is the fashion to attribute every thing to the French revolution, and the French revolution to every thing but its real cause. That cause is obvious—the government exacted too much, and the people could neither give nor bear more. Without this, the Encyclopedists might have written their fingers off without the occurrence of a single alteration. And the English revolution-(the first, I mean)—what was it occasioned by? The puritans were surely as pious and moral as Wesley or his biographer. Acts-acts on the part of government, and not writings against them-have caused the past convulsions, and are tending to the future.

'I look upon such as inevitable, though no revolutionist: I wish to see the English constitution restored, and not destroyed. Born an aristocrat, and naturally one by temper, with the greater part of my present property in the funds, what have I to gain by a revolution? Perhaps I have more to lose in every way than Mr. Southey, with all his places and presents for panegyrics and abuse into the bargain. But that a revolution is inevitable, I repeat, The government may exult over the repression of petty tumults; these are but the receding waves repulsed and broken for a moment on the shore, while the great tide is still rolling on and gaining ground with every breaker.

Mr.

Southey accuses us of attacking the religion of the country; and is he abetting it by writing lives of Wesley? One mode of worship is merely destroyed by another. There never was, nor ever will be, a country without a religion. We shall be told of France again: but it was only Paris, and a frantic party, which for a moment upheld their dogmatic nonsense of theo-philanthropy. The Church of England, if overthrown, will be swept away by the sectarians, and not by the sceptics. People are too wise, too well informed, too certain of their own immense importance in the realms of space, ever to submit to the impiety of doubt. There may be a few such diffident speculators, like water in the pale sunbeam of human reason: but they are very few; and their opinions, without enthusiasm or appeal to the passions, can never gain proselytes-unless, indeed, they are persecuted ;—that, to be sure, will increase any thing.

Mr. S., with a cowardly ferocity, exults over the anticipated "deathbed repentance" of the objects of his dislike; and indulges himself in a pleasant “Vision of Judgment," in prose as well as verse, full of impious impudence. What Mr. S.'s sensations or ours may be in the awful moment of leaving this state of existence neither he nor we can pretend to decide. In common, I presume, with most men of any reflection, I have not waited for a "death-bed" to repent of many of my actions, notwithstanding the "diabolical pride" which this pitiful renegado in his rancour would impute to those who scorn him. Whether upon the whole the good or evil of my deeds may preponderate is not for me to ascertain; but, as my means and opportunities have been greater, I shall limit my present defence to an assertion, (easily proved, 'f necessary,) that I, "in my degree," have done more real good in any one given year, since I was twenty, than Mr. Southey in the whole course of his shifting and turncoat existence. There are several actions to which I can look back with an honest pride, not to be damped by the calumnies of a hireling. There are others to which I recur with sorrow and repentance; but the only act of my life of which Mr. Southey can have any real knowledge, as it was one which brought ine in contact with a near connexion of his own, did no dishonor to that connexion nor to me.

I am not ignorant of Mr. Southey's calumnies on a different occasion, knowing them to be such, which he scattered abroad on his return from Switzerland against me and others: they have done him no good in this world; and, if his creed be the right one, they will do him less in the next. What his "death-bed" may be it is not my

province to predicate: let him settle it with his Maker, as I must do with mine. There is something at once ludicrous and blasphemous in this arrogant scribbler of all works sitting down to deal damnation and destruction upon his fellow-creatures, with "Wat Tyler," the "Apotheosis of George the Third," and the " Elegy on Martin the Regicide," all shuffled together in his writing-desk.'

This was savage, unbecoming, unmanly, and wholly uncalled for by the provocation. Even the Edinburgh Reviewers, who had become favorable to Lord Byron, and who are well known to be no friends of Mr. Southey, could not in decency see this without protesting against

it.

They say:

We think the abuse of Mr. Southey, both here and in some of Lord B.'s recent poetry, by far too savage and intemperate. It is of ill example, we think, in the literary world, and does no honour either to the taste or the temper of the noble author. For the Laureate's opinion, on any question of politics or principle, no person certainly can entertain less respect than we do; but we conceive that the inconsistencies of his life, and the extravagance of his contradictory tenets, have long ago deprived him of all authority with reasonable men, and render his present personalities as insignificant as the earlier ones with which they may now be contrasted. For our own parts, we are far from thinking it impossible that a man of Mr. Southey's intellectual dimensions should really make it a matter of conscience to atone for the sedition of his youth by the servility of his riper age. But his first excesses render his last innoxious; and his former violence, which probably suggested his present as its necessary expiation, may safely be left to neutralize its effects. A renegado, too, it should never be forgotten, has an apology for intolerance, both in his temper and his interests, which does not belong to one who has no recantations to justify; and besides, it would have become Lord B. to have remembered, that his antagonist, whatever may be his failings, was a person of respectable talents, and, in private life, of irreproachable character.

But it is not with him, or the merits of the treatment he has either given or received, that we have now any concern. We have a word or two to say on the griefs of Lord Byron himself. He complains bitterly of the detraction by which he has been assailed, and intimates that his works have been received by the public with far less cordiality and favour than he was entitled to expect. We are constrained to say that this appears to us a very extraordinary mistake. In the whole

course of our experience we cannot recollect a single author who has had so little reason to complain of his reception-to whose genius the public has been so early and so constantly just-to whose faults they have been so long and so signally indulgent. From the very first, he must have been aware that he offended the principles and shocked the prejudices of the majority, by his sentiments, as much as he delighted them by his talents. Yet there never was an author so universally and warmly applauded, so gently admonished, so kindly entreated to look more heedfully to his opinions. He took the praise, as usual, and rejected the advice. As he grew in faine and authority, he aggravated all his offences-clung more foudly to all he had been reproached with-and only took leave of Childe Harold to ally himself to Don Juan! That he has since been talked of, in public aud in private, with less unmingled admiration-that his name is now mentioned as often for censure as for praise—and that the exultation with which his countrymen once hailed the greatest of our living poets is now alloyed by the recollection of the tendency of his writings-is matter of notoriety to all the world; but matter of surprise, we should imagine, to nobody but Lord B. himself.

He would fain persuade himself, indeed, that this decline of his popularity or rather this stain upon its lustre, for he is still popular beyond all other example, and it is only because he is so that we feel any interest in this discussion;-he wishes to believe that he is indebted for the censures that have reached him, not to any actual demerits of his own, but to the jealousy of those he has supplanted, the envy of those he has outshone, or the party rancour of those against whose corruptions he has testified; while, at other times, he seems inclined to insinuate, that it is chiefly because he is a gentleman and a nobleman that plebeian censors have couspired to bear him down! We scarcely think, however, that these theories will pass with Lord B. himself—we are sure they will pass with no other person. They are so manifestly inconsistent as mutually to destroy each other; and so weak, as to be quite insufficient to account for the fact, even if they could be effectually combined for that purpose.

That the base and the bigotted-those whom he has darkened by his glory, spited by his talent, or mortified by his neglect—have taken advantage of the prevailing disaffection to vent their puny malice in silly nicknames and vulgar scurrility, is natural and true. But Lord B. may depend upon it that the dissatisfaction is not confined to them;