s sharp common-sense at once suggested the abolition of the Laureate duties, but the retention of the office as a sinecure. Walter Scott, to whom the place was offered, as the most popular of living poets, seconded the counsel of Croker, but declined the appointment, as beneath the dignity of the intended founder of a long line of border knights. He recommended Southey. He had already recommended Southey to the "Quarterly," and through the "Quarterly" to Croker, then and still its most brilliant contributor; and this second instance of disinterested kindness was equally efficacious. Southey was appointed. The tierce of Canary ceased to be a perquisite of the office, the Laureate disclaiming it; and instead of annual odes upon set occasions, such effusions as the poet might choose to offer at the suggestion of passing events were to be accepted as the sum of official duty. These were to be said or read, not sung,--a change that completed the radical revolution of the office.
However important the salary of a hundred pounds may have been to Southey, it is very sure that the laurel seemed to infuse all its noxious and poisonous juices into his literary character. His vanity, like Whitehead's, led him to regard his chaplet as the reward of unrivalled merit. His study-chair was glorified, and became a throne. His supremacy in poetry was as indubitable as the king's supremacy in matters ecclesiastical. He felt himself constrained to eliminate utterly from his conscience whatever traces of early republicanism, pantisocracy, and heresy still disfigured it; and to conform unreservedly to the exactest requirements of high Toryism in politics and high Churchism in religion. He was in the pay and formed a part of the government; could he do else than toil mightily in his department for the service of a master who had so sagaciously anticipated the verdict of posterity, as to declare him, who was the least popular, the greatest of living poets? He found it a duty to assume a rigid censorship over as many of his Majesty's lieges as were addicted to verse,--to enact the functions of minister of literary police,--to reprehend the levity of Moore, the impiety of Byron, the democracy of Leigh Hunt, the unhappy lapse of Hazlitt, the drunkenness of Lamb. Assumptions so open to ridicule, and so disparaging to far abler men, told as disadvantageously upon his fame as upon his character. He became the butt of contemporary satire. Horace Smith, Moore, Shelley, Byron, lampooned him savagely. The latter made him the hero of his wicked "Vision of Judgment," and to him dedicated his "Don Juan." The dedication was suppressed; but no chance offered in the body of that profligate rhapsody to assail Bob Southey, that was not vigorously employed. The self-content of the Laureate armed him, however, against every thrust. Contempt he interpreted as envy of his sublime elevation:--
"Grin, Envy, through thy ragged mask of scorn!
In honor it was given; with honor it is worn."
Of course such matchless self-complacency defied assault.
Southey's congratulatory odes appeared as often as public occasion seemed to demand them. There were in rapid succession the "Ode to the Regent," the "Carmen Triumphale," the "Pilgrimage to Waterloo," the "Vision of Judgment," the "Carmen Nuptiale," the "Ode on the Death of the Princess Charlotte." The "Quarterly" exalted them, one and all; the "Edinburgh" poured upon them volleys of keen but ineffectual ridicule. At last the Laureate desisted. The odes no longer appeared; and during the long and dark closing years of his life, the only production of the Laureate pen was the yearly signature to a receipt for one hundred pounds sterling, official salary.
Robert Southey died in March, 1843. Sir Robert Peel, who had obliged Wordsworth the year before, by transferring the post in the excise, which he had so long held, to the poet's son, and substituting a pension for its salary, testified further his respect for the Bard
