of age, and was already reconciled enough to be looking forward to an ordinary professional career. Nobody could blame a man seriously for altering the doctrines which had attracted him at college. But Southey did not really change his opinions; he only changed what he had erroneously supposed to be his opinons. The change of his early teacher, Coleridge, involved an intellectual elaboration: the abandonment of the philosophy which had satisfied his early youth, and the steeping of his mind in the mystical doctrines discovered in Germany. Wordsworth, when he rejected the revolutionary teachers, went through a prolonged spiritual crisis, and had to struggle long and grievously before he could get his feet upon a satisfactory rock. When Southey changed, it did not even occur to him that he was changing at all. He did not alter his philosophical creed, because he had no philosophical creed to alter. He got on very well, as most of us do, without one. He does not know much about metaphysics, as he admits, at twenty-one, but he has quite enough to confute Godwin. He takes up the first handy argument that is lying about. It will do to rap his antagonist's knuckles, and he does not inquire to what else it may commit him. His son tells
