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require my presence and I am a father. I have still some friends whom I wish to meet again, and it may be, an enemy. These things, and those minuter details of business, which time accumulates during absence, in every man's affairs and property, may, and probably will, recall me to England; but I shall return with the same feelings with which I left it, in respect to itself, though altered with regard to individuals, as I have been more or less informed of their conduct since my departure; for it was only a considerable time after it that I was made acquainted with the real facts and full extent of some of their proceedings and language. My friends, like other friends, from conciliatory motives, withheld from me much that they could, and some things which they should have unfolded; however, that which is deferred is not lost - but it has been no fault of mine that it has been deferred at all.

I have alluded to what is said to have passed at Rome merely to show that the sentiment which I have described was not confined to the English in England, and as forming part of my answer to the reproach cast upon what has been called my " selfish exile," and my "voluntary exile." "Voluntary" it has been; for who would dwell among a people entertaining strong hostility against him? How far it has been "selfish" has been already explained.

I have now arrived at a passage describing me as having vented my " spleen against the lofty-minded and virtuous men," men " whose virtues few indeed can equal;" meaning, I humbly presume, the notorious triumvirate known by the name of " Lake

Poets" in their aggregate capacity, and by Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, when taken singly. I wish to say a word or two upon the virtues of one of those persons, public and private, for reasons which will soon appear.

When I left England in April, 1816, ill in mind, in body, and in circumstances, I took up my residence at Coligny, by the lake of Geneva. The sole companion of my journey was a young physician, (1) who had to make his way in the world, and having seen very little of it, was naturally and laudably desirous of seeing more society than suited my present habits or my past experience. I therefore presented him to those gentlemen of Geneva for whom I had letters of introduction; and having thus seen him in a situation to make his own way, retired for my own part entirely from society, with the exception of one English family, living at about a quarter of a mile's distance from Diodati, and with the further exception of some occasional intercourse with Coppet at the wish of Madame de Staël. The English family to which I allude consisted of two ladies, a gentleman and his son, a boy of a year old. (2)

One of "these lofty-minded and virtuous men,” in the words of the Edinburgh Magazine, made, I understand, about this time, or soon after, a tour in Switzerland. On his return to England, he circulated

- and for any thing I know, invented - a report, that the gentleman to whom I have alluded and myself were living in promiscuous intercourse with

(1) [Dr. Polidori - author of the "Vampire."]

(2) [Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, Miss Clermont, and Master Shelley.].

two sisters," having formed a league of incest" (I quote the words as they were stated to me), and indulged himself on the natural comments upon such a conjunction, which are said to have been repeated publicly, with great complacency, by another of that poetical fraternity, of whom I shall say only, that even had the story been true, he should not have repeated it, as far as it regarded myself, except in sorrow. The tale itself requires but a word in answer the ladies were not sisters, nor in any degree connected, except by the second marriage of their respective parents, a widower with a widow, both being the offspring of former marriages; neither of them were, in 1816, nineteen years old. "Promiscuous intercourse" could hardly have disgusted the great patron of pantisocracy, (does Mr. Southey remember such a scheme?) but there was

none.

How far this man, who, as author of Wat Tyler, has been proclaimed by the Lord Chancellor guilty of a treasonable and blasphemous libel, and denounced in the House of Commons, by the upright and able member for Norwich, as a 66 rancorous renegado," be fit for sitting as a judge upon others, let others judge. He has said that for this expres

sion "he brands William Smith on the forehead as a calumniator," and that "the mark will outlast his epitaph." (1) How long William Smith's epitaph will last, and in what words it will be written, I know not, but William Smith's words form the epitaph itself of Robert Southey. He has written Wat

(1) [See antè, Vol. XII. p. 301.]

he

Tyler, and taken the office of poet laureate has, in the Life of Henry Kirke White, denominated reviewing "the ungentle craft," and has become a reviewer he was one of the projectors of a scheme, called "pantisocracy," for having all things, including women, in common, (query, common women?) and he sets up as a moralist - he denounced the battle of Blenheim, and he praised the battle of Waterloo - he loved Mary Wollstoncraft, and he tried to blast the character of her daughter (one of the females mentioned) — he wrote treason, young and serves the king- - he was the butt of the Antijacobin, and he is the prop of the Quarterly Review; licking the hands that smote him, eating the bread of his enemies, and internally writhing beneath his own contempt, - he would fain conceal, under anonymous bluster, and a vain endeavour to obtain the esteem of others, after having for ever lost his own, his leprous sense of his own degradation. What is there in such a man to "envy?" Who ever envied the envious? Is it his birth, his name, his fame, or his virtues, that I am to “ envy ?" I was born of the aristocracy, which he abhorred; and am sprung, by my mother, from the kings who preceded those whom he has hired himself to sing. It cannot, then, be his birth. As a poet, I have, for the past eight years, had nothing to apprehend from a competition; and for the future," that life to come in every poet's creed," it is open to all. I will only remind Mr. Southey, in the words of a critic, who, if still living, would have annihilated Southey's literary existence now and hereafter, as the sworn

foe of charlatans and impostors, from Macpherson downwards, that "those dreams were Settle's once and Ogilby's;" and, for my own part, I assure him, that whenever he and his sect are remembered, I shall be proud to be "forgot." That he is not content with his success as a poet may reasonably be believed he has been the nine-pin of reviews; the Edinburgh knocked him down, and the Quarterly set him up; the government found him useful in the periodical line, and made a point of recommending his works to purchasers, so that he is occasionally bought, (I mean his books, as well as the author,) and may be found on the same shelf, if not upon the table, of most of the gentlemen employed in the different offices. With regard to his private virtues, I know nothing— of his principles, I have heard enough. As far as having been, to the best of my power, benevolent to others, I do not fear the comparison; and for the errors of the passions, was Mr. Southey always so tranquil and stainless? Did he never covet his neighbour's wife? Did he never calumniate his neighbour's wife's daughter, the offspring of her he coveted? So much for the apostle of pantisocracy.

Of the "lofty-minded, virtuous" Wordsworth, one anecdote will suffice to speak his sincerity. In a conversation with Mr. upon poetry, he concluded with," After all, I would not give five shillings for all that Southey has ever written." Perhaps this calculation might rather show his esteem for five shillings than his low estimate of Dr. Southey; but considering that when he was in his