Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/276

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
234

withdraw them? Why does he not withdraw them, or why did he attempt to get an Injunction against poor Wat? Some one who does not know Mr. Southey—has suggested as an answer,—By not withdrawing the Poems, he pockets the receipts; and by getting an Injunction against Wat Tyler, he would have done the same thing. In p. 23, Mr. Southey states, that he is "in the same rank in society" as Mr. Smith, which we have yet to learn: and that he and Mr. Smith "were cast by nature in different moulds," which we think was lucky for the Member for Norwich. In p. 25, Mr. Southey rails at "the whole crew of ultra Whigs and Anarchists, from Messrs. Brougham and Clodius, down to Cobbett, Cethegus, and Co.;" and in pages 26, 27, he compliments himself: "I ask you, Sir, in which of my writings I have appealed to the base and malignant feelings of mankind;—and I ask you, whether the present race of revolutionary writers appeal to any other? What man's private character did I stab? Whom did I libel? Whom did I slander? Whom did I traduce? These miscreants live by calumny and sedition: they are libellers and liars by trade." After this, Sir Anthony Absolute's "Damn you, can't you be cool, like me?" will hardly pass for a joke! "For a man to know another well, were to know himself."

But we must conclude, and shall do so, with some passages taken at a venture. "I did not fall into the error of those, who, having been the friends of France when they imagined that the cause of liberty was implicated in her success, transferred their attachment from the Republic to the military tyranny in which it ended, and regarded with complacency the progress of oppression, because France was the oppressor." What does Mr. Southey call that military establishment which is at present kept up in France to keep the Bourbons on the throne, and to keep down the French people? Mr. Southey has, it seems, transferred his attachment from the Republic, not to Bonaparte, but to the Bourbons. They stand Mr. Southey instead of the Republic; they are the true "children and champions of Jacobinism;" the