which he contributes to the Quarterly Review, the cast-off, thread-bare, tattered excuses of Paley's Moral Philosophy, and Windham's hashed-up speeches? Why, all the prodigious discoveries which Mr. Southey there details with such dry significance, are familiar to every school-boy, are the common stock in trade of every spouter at a debating society, have been bandied about, hackneyed, exhausted any time these thirty years? And yet Mr. Southey was quite ignorant of them till very lately, they have broke upon him with a new and solemn light; they have come upon him by surprise, after three-and-twenty years; and at 'the last rebound, have overturned his tottering patriotism? Where is the use of Mr. Southey's regular scholastic education, if he is to be thus ignorant at twenty, thus versatile at forty? The object of such an education is to make men less astonished at their own successive discoveries, by putting them in possession beforehand of what has been discovered by others. Mr. Southey cannot, like Mr. Cobbett, plead in extenuation of his change of sentiment, that he was a self-taught man, who had to grope his way from error and prejudice to truth and reason; neither can he plead like Mr. Cobbett, in proof of the sincerity of his motives, that he has suffered the loss of liberty and property by his change of opinion: Mr. Southey has suffered nothing by his—but a loss of character!
A Letter to William Smith, Esq. M. P. from Robert Southey, Esq. John Murray, Albemarle-street. 1817. Price 2s.
(CONCLUDED.)
Mr. Southey in the next paragraph says, that, "it is a nice question, in what degree he, as the author, partook of the sentiments expressed in the dramatic poem of Wat Tyler;—too nice a one for Mr. Wm. Smith to decide;" and yet he accuses him of excessive malice or total want of judgment for deciding wrong.
