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Sir Thomas More; or, colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society. By
Robert Southey Esq., LL.D., Poet Laureate. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1829.
IT would be scarcely possible for a man of Mr. Southey's talents and
acquirements to write two volumes so large as those before us, which should be
wholly destitute of information and amusement. Yet we do not remember to have
read with so little satisfaction any equal quantity of matter, written by any
man of real abilities. We have, for some time past, observed with great regret
the strange infatuation which leads the Poet Laureate to abandon those
departments of literature in which he might excel, and to lecture the public on
sciences of which he has still the very alphabet to learn. He has now, we think,
done his worst. The subject which he has at last undertaken to treat, is one
which demands all the highest intellectual and moral qualities of a
philosophical statesman, an understanding at once comprehensive and acute, a
heart at once upright and charitable. Mr. Southey brings to the task two
faculties which were never, we believe, vouchsafed in measure so copious to any
human being, the faculty of believing without a reason, and the faculty of
hating without a provocation.
It is, indeed, most extraordinary, that a mind like Mr. Southey's, a mind richly
endowed in many respects by nature, and highly cultivated by study, a mind which
has exercised considerable influence on the most enlightened generation of the
most enlightened people that ever existed, should be utterly destitute of the
power of discerning truth from falsehood. Yet such is the fact. Government is to
Mr. Southey one of the fine arts. He judges of a theory, of a public measure, of
a religion or a political party, of a peace or a war, as men judge of a picture
or a statue, by the effect produced on his imagination. A chain of associations
is to him what a chain of reasoning is to other men; and what he calls his
opinions are in fact merely his tastes.
Part of this description might perhaps apply to a much greater man, Mr. Burke.
But Mr. Burke assuredly possessed an understanding admirably fitted for the
investigation of truth, an understanding stronger than that of any statesman,
active or speculative, of the eighteenth century, stronger than everything,
except his own fierce and ungovernable sensibility. Hence he generally chose his
side like a fanatic, and defended it like a philosopher. His conduct on the most
important occasions of his life, at the time of the impeachment of Hastings for
example, and at the time of the French Revolution, seems to have been prompted
by those feelings and motives which Mr. Coleridge has so happily described,
"Stormy pity, and the cherish'd lure Of pomp, and proud precipitance of soul."
Hindostan, with its vast cities, its gorgeous pagodas, its infinite swarms of
dusky population, its long-descended dynasties, its stately etiquette, excited
in a mind so capacious, so imaginative, and so susceptible, the most intense
interest. The peculiarities of the costume, of the manners, and of the laws, the
very mystery which hung over the language and origin of the people, seized his
imagination. To plead under the ancient arches of Westminster Hall, in the name
of the English people, at the bar of the English nobles for great nations and
kings separated from him by half the world, seemed to him the height of human
glory. Again, it is not difficult to perceive that his hostility to the French
Revolution principally arose from the vexation which he felt at having all his
old political associations disturbed, at seeing the well-known landmarks of
states obliterated, and the names and distinctions with which the history of
Europe had been filled for ages at once swept away. He felt like an antiquary
whose shield had been scoured, or a connoisseur who found his Titian retouched.
But, however he came by an opinion, he had no sooner got it than he did his best
to make out a legitimate title to it. His reason, like a spirit in the service
of an enchanter, though spell-bound, was still mighty. It did whatever work his
passions and his imagination might impose. But it did that work, however
arduous, with marvelous dexterity and vigor. His course was not determined by
argument; but he could defend the wildest course by arguments more plausible
than those by which common men support opinions which they have adopted after
the fullest deliberation. Reason has scarcely ever displayed, even in those
well-constituted minds of which she occupies the throne, so much power and
energy as in the lowest offices of that imperial servitude.
Now in the mind of Mr. Southey reason has no place at all, as either leader or
follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to know what an
argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to
answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never occurred to him, that a man
ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived
at his opinions than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them. It
has never occurred to him that there is a difference between assertion and
demonstration, that a rumor does not always prove a fact, that a single fact,
when proved, is hardly foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory
propositions cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the
way to settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with
something more convincing than "scoundrel" and "blockhead."
It would be absurd to read the works of such a writer for political instruction.
The utmost that can be expected from any system promulgated by him is that it
may be splendid and affecting, that it may suggest sublime and pleasing images.
His scheme of philosophy is a mere day-dream, a poetical creation, like the
Doindaniel cavern, the Swerga, or Padalon; and indeed it bears no inconsiderable
resemblance to those gorgeous visions. Like them, it has something, of
invention, grandeur, and brilliancy. But, like them, it is grotesque and
extravagant, and perpetually violates even that conventional probability which
is essential to the effect of works of art.
The warmest admirers of Mr. Southey will scarcely, we think, deny that his
success has almost always borne an inverse proportion to the degree in which his
undertakings have required a logical head. His poems, taken in the mass, stand
far higher than his prose works. His official Odes indeed, among which the
Vision of Judgment must be classed, are, for the most part, worse than Pye's and
as bad as Cibber's; nor do we think him generally happy in short pieces. But his
longer poems, though full of faults, are nevertheless very extraordinary
productions. We doubt greatly whether they will be read fifty years hence; but
that, if they are read, they will be admired, we have no doubt whatever.
But, though in general we prefer Mr. Southey's poetry to his prose, we must make
one exception. The Life of Nelson is, beyond all doubt, the most perfect and the
most delightful of his works. The fact is, as his poems most abundantly prove,
that he is by no means so skilful in designing as in filling up. It was
therefore an advantage to him to be furnished with an outline of characters and
events, and to have no other task to perform than that of touching the cold
sketch into life. No writer, perhaps, ever lived, whose talents so precisely
qualified him to write the history of the great naval warrior. There were no
fine riddles of the human heart to read, no theories to propound, no hidden
causes to develop, no remote consequences to predict. The character of the hero
lay on the surface. The exploits were brilliant and picturesque. The necessity
of adhering to the real course of events saved Mr., Southey from those faults
which deform the original plan of almost every one of his poems, and which even
his innumerable beauties of detail scarcely redeem. The subject did not require
the exercise of those reasoning powers the want of which is the blemish of his
prose. It would not be easy to find, in all literary history, an instance of a
more exact hit between wind and water. John Wesley and the Peninsular War were
subjects of a very different kind, subjects which required all the qualities of
a philosophic historian. In Mr. Southey's works on these subjects, he has, on
the whole, failed. Yet there are charming specimens of the art of narration in
both of them. The Life of Wesley will probably live. Defective as it is, it
contains the only popular account of a most remarkable moral revolution, and of
a man whose eloquence and logical acuteness might have made him eminent in
literature, whose genius for government was not inferior to that of Richelieu,
and who, whatever his errors may have been, devoted all his powers, in defiance
of obloquy and derision, to what he sincerely considered as the highest good of
his species. The History of the Peninsular War is already dead; indeed, the
second volume was dead-born. The glory of producing an imperishable record of
that great conflict seems to be reserved for Colonel Napier.
The Book of the Church contains some stories very prettily told. The rest is
mere rubbish. The adventure was manifestly one which could be achieved only by a
profound thinker, and one in which even a profound thinker might have failed,
unless his passions had been kept under strict control. But in all those works
in which Mr. Southey has completely abandoned narration, and has undertaken to
argue moral and political questions, his failure has been complete and
ignominious. On such occasions his writings are rescued from utter contempt and
derision solely by the beauty and purity of the English. We find, we confess, so
great a charm in Mr. Southey's style, that, even when be writes nonsense, we
generally read it with pleasure except indeed when he tries to be droll. A more
insufferable jester never existed. He very often attempts to be humorous, and
yet we do not remember a single occasion on which he has succeeded further than
to be quaintly and flippantly dull. In one of his works he tells us that Bishop
Sprat was very properly so called, inasmuch as he was a very small poet. And in
the book now before us he cannot quote Francis Bugg, the renegade Quaker,
without a remark on his unsavory name. A wise man might talk folly like this by
his own fireside; but that any human being, after having made such a joke,
should write it down, and copy it out, and transmit it to the printer, and
correct the proof-sheets, and send it forth into the world, is enough to make us
ashamed of our species.
The extraordinary bitterness of spirit which Mr. Southey manifests towards his
opponents is, no doubt, in a great measure to be attributed to the manner in
which he forms his opinions. Differences of taste, it has often been remarked,
produce greater exasperation than differences on points of science. But this is
not all. A peculiar austerity marks almost all Mr. Southey's judgments of men
and actions. We are far from blaming him for fixing on a high standard of
morals, and for applying that standard to every case. But rigor ought to be
accompanied by discernment; and of discernment Mr. Southey seems to be utterly
destitute. His mode of judging is monkish. It is exactly what we should expect
from a stern old Benedictine, who had been preserved from many ordinary
frailties by the restraints of his situation. No man out of a cloister ever
wrote about love, for example, so coldly and at the same time me so grossly. His
descriptions of it are just what we should hear from a recluse who knew the
passion only from the details of the confessional. Almost all his heroes make
love either like Seraphim or like cattle. He seems to have no notion of anything
between the Platonic passion of the Glendoveer who gazes with rapture on his
mistress's leprosy, and the brutal appetite of Arvalan and Roderick. In
Roderick, indeed, the two characters are united. He is first all clay, and then
all spirit. He goes forth a Tarquin, and comes back too ethereal to be married.
The only love scene, as far as we can recollect, in Madoc, consists of the
delicate attentions which a savage, who has drunk too much of the Prince's
excellent metheglin, offers to Goervyl. It would be the labor of a week to find,
in all the vast mass of Mr. Southey's poetry, a single passage indicating any
sympathy with those feelings which have consecrated the shades of Vaucluse and
the rocks of Meillerie.
Indeed, if we except some very pleasing images of paternal tenderness and filial
duty, there is scarcely anything soft or humane in Mr. Southey's poetry. What
theologians call the spiritual sins are his cardinal virtues, hatred, pride, and
the insatiable thirst of vengeance. These passions he disguises under the name
of duties; he purifies them from the alloy of vulgar interests; he ennobles them
by uniting them with energy, fortitude, and a severe sanctity of manners; and he
then holds them up to the admiration of mankind. This is the spirit of Thalaba,
of Ladurlad, of Adosinda, of Roderick after his conversion. It is the spirit
which, in all his writings, Mr. Southey appears to affect. "I do well to be
angry," seems to be the predominant feeling of his mind. Almost the only mark of
charity which he vouchsafes to his opponents is to pray for their reformation;
and this he does in terms not unlike those in which we can imagine a Portuguese
priest interceding with Heaven for a Jew, delivered over to the secular arm
after a relapse.
We have always heard, and fully believe, that Mr. Southey is a very amiable and
humane man; nor do we intend to apply to him personally any of the remarks which
we have made on the spirit of his writings. Such are the caprices of human
nature. Even Uncle Toby troubled himself very little about the French grenadiers
who fell on the glacis of Namur. And Mr. Southey, when he takes up his pen,
changes his nature as much as Captain Shandy when he girt on his sword. The only
opponents to whom the Laureate gives quarter are those in whom he finds
something of his own character reflected. He seems to have an instinctive
antipathy for calm, moderate men, for men who shun extremes, and who render
reasons. He has treated Mr. Owen of Lanark, for example, with infinitely more
respect than he has shown to Mr. Hallam or to Dr. Lingard; and this for no
reason that we can discover, except that Mr. Owen is more unreasonably and
hopelessly in the wrong than any speculator of our time.
Mr. Southey's political system is just what we might expect from a man who
regards politics, not as matter of science, but as matter of taste and feeling.
All his schemes of government have been inconsistent with themselves. In his
youth he was a republican; yet, as he tells us in his preface to these
Colloquies, he was even then opposed to the Catholic Claims. He is now a violent
Ultra-Tory. Yet, while he maintains, with vehemence approaching to ferocity, all
the sterner and harsher parts of the Ultra-Tory theory of government, the baser
and dirtier part of that theory disgusts him. Exclusion, persecution, severe
punishments for libelers and demagogues, proscriptions, massacres, civil war, if
necessary, rather than any concession to a discontented people; these are the
measures which he seems inclined to recommend. A severe and gloomy tyranny,
crushing opposition, silencing remonstrance, drilling the minds of the people
into unreasoning obedience, has in it something of grandeur which delights his
imagination. But there is nothing fine in the shabby tricks and jobs of office;
and Mr. Southey, accordingly, has no toleration for them. When a Jacobin, he did
not perceive that his system led logically, and would have led practically, to
the removal of religious distinctions. He now commits a similar error. He
renounces the abject and paltry part of the creed of his party, without
perceiving that it is also an essential part of that creed. He would have
tyranny and purity together; though the most superficial observation might have
shown him that there can be no tyranny without corruption.
It is high time, however, that we should proceed to the consideration of the
work which is our more immediate subject, and which, indeed, illustrates in
almost every page our general remarks on Mr. Southey's writings. In the preface,
we are informed that the author, notwithstanding some statements to the
contrary, was always opposed to the Catholic Claims. We fully believe this; both
because we are sure that Mr. Southey is incapable of publishing a deliberate
falsehood, and because his assertion is in itself probable. We should have
expected that, even in his wildest paroxysms of democratic enthusiasm, Mr.
Southey would have felt no wish to see a simple remedy applied to a great
practical evil. We should have expected that the only measure which all the
great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each other in supporting
would be the only measure which Mr. Southey would have agreed with himself in
opposing. He has passed from one extreme of political opinion to another, as
Satan in Milton went round the globe, contriving constantly to "ride with
darkness." Wherever the thickest shadow of the night may at any moment chance to
fall, there is Mr. Southey. It is not everybody who could have so dexterously
avoided blundering on the daylight in the course of a journey to the antipodes.
Mr. Southey has not been fortunate in the plan of any of his fictitious
narratives. But he has never failed so conspicuously as in the work before us;
except, indeed, in the wretched Vision of Judgment. In November 1817, it seems
the Laureate was sitting over his newspaper, and meditating about the death of
the Princess Charlotte. An elderly person of very dignified aspect makes his
appearance, announces himself as a stranger from a distant country, and
apologizes very politely for not having provided himself with letters of
introduction. Mr. Southey supposes his visitor to be some American gentleman who
has come to see the lakes and the lake-poets, and accordingly proceeds to
perform, with that grace, which only long practice can give, all the duties
which authors owe to starers. He assures his guest that some of the most
agreeable visits which he has received have been from Americans, and that he
knows men among them whose talents and virtues would do honor to any country. In
passing we may observe, to the honor of Mr. Southey, that, though he evidently
has no liking for the American institutions, he never speaks of the people of
the United States with that pitiful affectation of contempt by which some
members of his party have done more than wars or tariffs can do to excite mutual
enmity between two communities formed for mutual fellowship. Great as the faults
of his mind are, paltry spite like this has no place in it. Indeed it is
scarcely conceivable that a man of his sensibility and his imagination should
look without pleasure and national pride on the vigorous and splendid youth of a
great people, whose veins are filled with our blood, whose minds are nourished
with our literature, and on whom is entailed the rich inheritance of our
civilization, our freedom, and our glory.
But we must return to Mr. Southey's study at Keswick. The visitor informs the
hospitable poet that he is not an American but a spirit. Mr. Southey, with more
frankness than civility, tells him that he is a very queer one. The stranger
holds out his hand. It has neither weight nor substance. Mr. Southey upon this
becomes more serious; his hair stands on end; and he adjures the specter to tell
him what he is, and why he comes. The ghost turns out to be Sir Thomas More. The
traces of martyrdom, it seems, are worn in the other world, as stars and ribands
are worn in this. Sir Thomas shows the poet a red streak round his neck,
brighter than a ruby, and informs him that Cranmer wears a suit of flames in
Paradise, the right hand glove, we suppose, of peculiar brilliancy.
Sir Thomas pays but a short visit on this occasion, but promises to cultivate
the new acquaintance which he has formed, and, after begging that his visit may
be kept secret from Mrs. Southey, vanishes into air.
The rest of the book consists of conversations between Mr. Southey and the
spirit about trade, currency, Catholic emancipation, periodical literature,
female nunneries, butchers, snuff, bookstalls, and a hundred other subjects. Mr.
Southey very hospitably takes an opportunity to escort the ghost round the
lakes, and directs his attention to the most beautiful points of view. Why a
spirit was to be evoked for the purpose of talking over such matters and seeing
such sights, why the vicar of the parish, a blue-stocking from London, or an
American, such as Mr. Southey at first supposed the aerial visitor to be, might
not have done as well, we are unable to conceive. Sir Thomas tells Mr. Southey
nothing about future events, and indeed absolutely disclaims the gifts of
prescience. He has learned to talk modern English. He has read all the new
publications, and loves a jest as well as when he jested with the executioner,
though we cannot say that the quality of his wit has materially improved in
Paradise. His powers of reasoning, too, are by no means in as great vigor as
when he sate on the woolsack; and though he boasts that he is "divested of all
those passions which cloud the intellects and warp the understandings of men,"
we think him, we must confess, far less stoical than formerly. As to
revelations, he tells Mr. Southey at the outset to expect none from him. The
Laureate expresses some doubts, which assuredly will not raise him in the
opinion of our modern millenarians, as to the divine authority of the
Apocalypse. But the ghost preserves an impenetrable silence. As far as we
remember, only one hint about the employment of disembodied spirits escapes him.
He encourages Mr. Southey to hope that there is a Paradise Press, at which all
the valuable publications of Mr. Murray and Mr. Colburn are reprinted as
regularly as at Philadelphia; and delicately insinuates that Thalaba and the
Curse of Kehama are among the number. What a contrast does this absurd fiction
present to those charming narratives which Plato and Cicero prefixed to their
dialogues! What cost in machinery, yet what poverty of effect! A ghost brought
in to say what any man might have said! The glorified spirit of a great
statesman and philosopher dawdling, like a bilious old nabob at a
watering-place, over quarterly reviews and novels, dropping in to pay long
calls, making excursions in search of the picturesque! The scene of St. George
and St. Dennis in the Pucelle is hardly more ridiculous. We know what Voltaire
meant. Nobody, however, can suppose that Mr. Southey means to make game of the
mysteries of a higher state of existence. The fact is that, in the work before
us, in the Vision of Judgment, and in some of his other pieces, his mode of
treating the most solemn subjects differs from that of open scoffers only as the
extravagant representations of sacred persons and things in some grotesque
Italian paintings differ from the caricatures which Carlile exposes in the front
of his shop. We interpret the particular act by the general character. What in
the window of a convicted blasphemer we call blasphemous, we call only absurd
and ill-judged in an altar-piece.
We now come to the conversations which pass between Mr. Southey and Sir Thomas
More, or rather between two Southeys, equally eloquent, equally angry, equally
unreasonable, and equally given to talking about what they do not understand.1
Perhaps we could not select a better instance of the spirit which pervades the
whole book than the passages in which Mr. Southey gives his opinion of the
manufacturing system. There is nothing which he hates so bitterly. It is,
according to him, a system more tyrannical than that of the feudal ages, a
system of actual servitude, a system which destroys the bodies and degrades the
minds of those who are engaged in it. He expresses a hope that the competition
of other nations may drive us out of the field; that our foreign trade may
decline; and that we may thus enjoy a restoration of national sanity and
strength. But he seems to think that the extermination of the whole
manufacturing population would be a blessing, if the evil could be removed in no
other way.
Mr. Southey does not bring forward a single fact in support of these views; and,
as it seems to us, there are facts which lead to a very different conclusion. In
the first place, the poor-rate is very decidedly lower in the manufacturing than
in the agricultural districts. If Mr. Southey will look over the Parliamentary
returns on this subject, he will find that the amount of parochial relief
required by the laborers in the different counties of England is almost exactly
in inverse proportion to the degree in which the manufacturing system has been
introduced into those counties. The returns for the years ending in March 1825,
and in March 1828, are now before us. In the former year we find the poor-rate
highest in Sussex, about twenty shillings to every inhabitant. Then come
Buckinghamshire, Essex, Suffolk, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Kent, and
Norfolk. In all these the rate is above fifteen shillings a head. We will not go
through the whole. Even in Westmoreland and the North Riding of Yorkshire, the
rate is at more than eight shillings. In Cumberland and Monmouthshire, the most
fortunate of all the agricultural districts, it is at six shillings. But in the
West Riding of Yorkshire, it is as low as five shillings. and when we come to
Lancashire, we find it at four shillings, one-fifth of what it is in Sussex. The
returns of the year ending in March 1828 are a little, and but a little, more
unfavorable to the manufacturing districts. Lancashire, even in that season of
distress, required a smaller poor-rate than any other district, and little more
than one-fourth of the poor-rate raised in Sussex. Cumberland alone, of the
agricultural districts, was as well off as the West Riding of Yorkshire. These
facts seem to indicate that the manufacturer is both in a more comfortable and
in a less dependent situation than the agricultural laborer.
As to the effect of the manufacturing system on the bodily health, we must beg
leave to estimate it by a standard far too low and vulgar for a mind so
imaginative as that of Mr. Southey, the proportion of births and deaths. We know
that, during the growth of this atrocious system, this new misery, to use the
phrases of Mr. Southey, this new enormity, this birth of a portentous age, this
pest which no man can approve whose heart is not scared or whose understanding
has not been darkened, there has been a great diminution of mortality, and that
this diminution has been greater in the manufacturing towns than anywhere else.
The mortality still is, as it always was, greater in towns than in the country.
But the difference has diminished in an extraordinary degree. There is the best
reason to believe that the annual mortality of Manchester, about the middle of
the last century, was one in twenty-eight. It is now reckoned at one in
forty-five. In Glasgow and Leeds a similar improvement has taken place. Nay, the
rate of mortality in those three great capitals of the manufacturing districts
is now considerably less than it was, fifty years ago, over England and Wales,
taken together, open country and all. We might with some plausibility maintain
that the people live longer because they are better fed, better lodged, better
clothed, and better attended in sickness, and that these improvements are owing
to that increase of national wealth which the manufacturing system has produced.
Much more might be said on this subject. But to what end? It is not from bills
of mortality and statistical tables that Mr. Southey has learned his political
creed. He cannot stoop to study the history of the system which he abuses, to
strike the balance between the good and evil which it has produced, to compare
district with district, or generation with generation. We will give his own
reason for his opinion, the only reason which he gives for it, in his own
words:--
"We remained a while in silence looking upon the assemblage of dwellings below.
Here, and in the adjoining hamlet of Millbeck, the effects of manufactures and
of agriculture may be seen and compared. The old cottages are such as the poet
and the painter equally delight in beholding. Substantially built of the native
stone without mortar, dirtied with no white lime, and their long low roofs
covered with slate, if they had been raised by the magic of some indigenous
Amphion's music, the materials could not have adjusted themselves more
beautifully in accord with the surrounding scene; and time has still further
harmonized them with weather stains, lichens, and moss, short grasses, and short
fern, and stone-plants of various kinds. The ornamented chimneys, round or
square, less adorned than those which, like little turrets, crest the houses of
the Portuguese peasantry; and yet not less happily suited to their place, the
hedge of clip box beneath the windows, the rose-bushes beside the door, the
little patch of flower-ground, with its tall hollyhocks in front; the garden
beside, the bee-hives, and the orchard with its bank of daffodils and
snow-drops, the earliest and the profusest in these parts, indicate in the
owners some portion of ease and leisure, some regard to neatness and comfort,
some sense of natural, and innocent, and healthful enjoyment. The new cottages
of the manufacturers are upon the manufacturing pattern--naked, and in a row.
"'How is it,' said I, 'that everything which is connected with manufactures
presents such features of unqualified deformity? From the largest of Mammon's
temples down to the poorest hovel in which his helotry are stalled, these
edifices have all one character. Time will not mellow them; nature will neither
clothe nor conceal them; and they will remain always as offensive to the eye as
to the mind.'"
Here is wisdom. Here are the principles on which nations are to be governed.
Rose-bushes and poor-rates, rather than steam-engines and independence.
Mortality and cottages with weather-stains, rather than health and long life
with edifices which time cannot mellow. We are told, that our age has invented
atrocities beyond the imagination of our fathers; that society has been brought
into a state compared with which extermination would be a blessing; and all
because the dwellings of cotton-spinners are naked and rectangular. Mr. Southey
has found out a way, he tells us, in which the effects of manufactures and
agriculture may be compared. And what is this way? To stand on a hill, to look
at a cottage and a factory, and to see which is the prettier. Does Mr. Southey
think that the body of the English peasantry live, or ever lived, in substantial
or ornamented cottages, with box-hedges, flower-gardens, beehives, and orchards?
If not, what is his parallel worth? We despise those mock philosophers, who
think that they serve the cause of science by depreciating literature and the
fine arts. But if anything could excuse their narrowness of mind, it would be
such a book as this. It is not strange that, when one enthusiast makes the
picturesque the test of political good, another should feel inclined to
proscribe altogether the pleasures of taste and imagination.
1 A passage in which some expressions used by Mr. Southey
were misrepresented, certainly without any unfair intention, has been here
omitted.
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