admirable work, if it led him into rash attempts to soar beyond his powers.
Undoubtedly such a conviction shows a weakness. A man could hardly take himself so seriously who had any very strong sense of humour. But a sense of humour is hard to reconcile with some cardinal virtues. The true humorist sees that the world is a tragi-comedy, a Vanity Fair, in which enthusiasm is out of place. Southey, with a sense of humour, would have been alive to his own smallness in the general system of things; he would have perceived that even a Quarterly Reviewer cannot make the great current flow backwards, and that a drudging journalist had no right to drape himself in the robes of a prophet. Hopes of 'literary immortality,' and a place among the dead with Virgil and Homer and Dante, are apt to strike the humorist as illusions—mere gaseous exhalations of vanity to be dispersed by an injection of chilling mockery. It was happy for Southey that he had hardly more humour than Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley or Miss Brontë. In spite of his defect, or his immunity, shall we say, from this morbid propensity, Southey was certainly no prig. He could enjoy nonsense and was proud of it, though his
