and children in the country, put forthwith in possession of their share of property and sovereignty. The lamentable weakness of the reasonings by which these considerable, innovations are recommended, and the miserable tameness and baldness of the composition, struck us, at first, as being in singular contrast with the boldness of the conception; but, upon reflection, we believe that the combination is quite natural,-both having their root in the utter debility of the understanding, of which habitual lowness and occasional extravagance are equally symptomatic. A very few specimens, taken at random, as the book opens, will abundantly justify our opinion. Hob Carter and Wat are discoursing on politics in the first act, when Wat pathetically observes 'Hob-I have only six groats in the world, And they must soon by law be taken from me!' p. 5. Hob manfully rejoins 'Curse on these taxes-one succeeds another Our ministers-panders of a king's will Drain all our wealth away-waste it in revels,' &c. p. 5, 6. Wat then elegantly proceeds in the same weighty and original style- They reap the glory-they enjoy the spoil We pay we bleed!-The sun would shine as cheerly, Though neither of these royal pests existed. Hob. Nay-as for that, we poor men should fare better; No legal robbers then should force away The hard-earn'd wages of our honest toil. The Parliament for ever cries, More money, The service of the state demands more money. Just heaven! of what service is the state?' p. 6, 7. Afterwards, Wat thus powerfully exhorts his neighbours to join him in the insurrection. Think of the insults, wrongs, and contumelies, Ye bear from your proud lords:-that your hard toil The privilege, forsooth, of noble birth!' p. 21, 22. Then the miseries of low birth are commemorated in the following beautiful verses Long, long labour, little rest, Still to toil to be oppress'd; Drain'd by taxes of his store, Punish'd next for being poor: p. 23, 24. But the lofty vein of the piece is reserved for John Ball the priest, who, when complimented by the carter and the rest of them, replies with a noble modesty My brethren, I am plain John Ball,-your friend, and then delivers an harangue, the burden of which is still, that it is quite monstrous and intolerable that the poor labourer should plough the fields, and the landlord take the sheaves to himself. The conclusion is much in the peculiar emphatic vein which distinguishes the Laureate odes of the same eminent author. 'There is enough for all; but your proud baron These fields are mine, for I was born to them, Almighty God! such blasphemies believ'd!' p. 29, 30. By and by the King, and an Archbishop, and a Chief-Justice, are brought in, to display a scene of the most naked, silly, and incredible cowardice, perjury and falsehood;—and they and their offices are held up to ridicule and hatred, with all the effect that the exceeding feebleness of the author's genius can produce. In order to bring the royal style and dignity into contempt, this learned antiquary and powerful satirist thus repeats it Richard the Second, by the grace of God, Of England, Ireland, France, and Scotland, King, --which excellent joke is again repeated in the recitation of the royal charter.At the parley, this perjured Monarch is made to say "You should have tried By milder means-petition'd at the throne The throne will always listen to petitions.' p. 42. To which the valiant insurgent thus nobly answers• Petitioning for pity is most weak, The Sovereign People ought to demand justice!'— Afterwards, John Bail tells the wicked courtiers, that it is they, and not he, that are guilty of treason-because that they 'Rebel against the People's Sovereignty.' And one of his pupils very emphatically exclaims 'Why are not all these empty ranks abolish'd- Are we not all equal?' By and by the Archbishop is made to urge the King to perjure himself and the Chief-Justice makes jokes on the prostitution of the law. John Ball is finally brought to trial, where, with heroic constancy he maintains That all mankind as brethren must be equal; Are evil and oppressive; that the right The poor whom you oppress.' p. 64. and, upon this confession, he is forthwith sentenced by Sir John Tresilian, in the following words-which, we have no doubt, Mr. Southey thought admirably calculated to expose the mock-majesty of courts of justice, and to inflame the popular indignation against the cruel punishments which they sometimes award • John Ball, whereas you are accused before us Of stirring up the people to rebellion, And preaching to them strange and dangerous doctrines; Has been most insolent and contumacious; Insulting majesty:-And since you have pleaded The city gates-a terrible example And the Lord God have mercy on your soul!' p. 68. Such is the work, of which, and of the doctrines it contains, Mr. Southey now assures us, that he sees no reason whatever for being ashamed, before God or before man-that it is written as a youth of twenty might be expected to write on such a subject-that if he were now to dramatize that subject anew, he should have little to alter, although there might be much to add;—and, finally, that his censors would not be the worse, 'were they to catch from it a little of the youthful generosity which it breathes.'-It is a fine thing to be thus in love with one's self-and fairly indemnifies a man, we take it, for all the ridicule which it provokes. We have but one or two very plain remarks to offer. In the first place, we think it pretty natural to conclude, that a man who thought and wrote in this way at 21, was not likely to think or write very rationally on political subjects at any age;-and when we consider, further, that this worthy author has now proclaimed to all the world, that he carried his affection for those principles so far, as actually to have formed a plan for retiring into the wilds of America with a few chosen friends, and there realizing their blessed visions of equality and common property-having been decently educated, and exposed to no persecution at home-we really must say that the fair conclusion is, that his brain is not very sufficiently timbered, and that no length of time will ever make him a sound or a safe reasoner on matters political. Such a man may come, in time, to make good dithyrambics; and, by long and industrious practice, may turn out a very pretty poet. That we do not dispute: But, for a practical statesman, we suspect there are not many people who would choose to trust him, after this specimen, or who would not be shy of following his leading, either as a reformer or a defender of the constitution. This is our first remark. Our second is, that if such a person should ever happen to take up an opposite humour in politics, it is reasonably to be expected that he should extol lords and princes with the same extravagance with which he once attacked them; and manifest the same infirmity of judgment and impatience of temper, in justifying the abuses of government, as he had originally shown in exaggerating them;-being in both equally the object of scorn and compassion to all men of sober judgment and practical knowledge. Finally, we would observe, that if such an one, not contented with vehemently condemning all that he had formerly extolled, should proceed to abuse those who leaned rather to his old than his new creed, and call upon the law to avenge those errors of opinion through which he himself thought he had been conducted to truth, he would fully deserve to be reproached with the intolerance of a proselyte, and the malignity of a renegado;-that is to say, if any body should think it worth while to deal so seriously with a matter so ridiculous. This is all we have to say upon the Dramatic Poem. The Letter, in laud and exposition of it, may require a little more notice. The member for Norwich, it seems, in commenting in his place on the late groundless alarms that had been excited in the country, and the needless severity with which government had been called upon to act, took occasion to observe, that some of the most violent philippics against reform, and some of the loudest exhortations to take vindictive measures to repress it, were understood to originate from quarters to which no great authority could attach, and from persons in whom such sentiments were peculiarly unbecoming. In particular, he said that certain intemperate passages, which he read from a late number of the Quarterly Review, were understood to be written by the author of Wat Tyler; with the doctrines of which exquisite piece he proceeded very briefly to contrast them, and is said to have added, that one who could proceed to such extremities against opinions he had himself formerly professed, must be considered as acting with the malignity of a renegado. An account of these observations appeared, in the ordinary way, in the newspapers; and this is the occasion of the epistle, vituperative and self-extolling, in which the poet-laureat has now entered his appeal to his country. His first complaint is, that the attack was made in an improper place; the author not being there to defend himself. Now, whether Mr. Smith's proceeding was perfectly in good taste or not—or whether he duly consulted the dignity of parliament in thus occupying its attention with matters so insignificant-may no doubt be made a question: But, that he had a right to make what remarks he thought fit, on any printed books that were then actually in circulation,-and that without calling their authors to the bar, we apprehend to be beyond all doubt. If any injury was done to the authors, it plainly was not so much by the speech in parliament, as by its publication in the newspapers; and these papers were equally open to them as to the reporters of the debate. But, says Mr. Southey, you could not know, except by report, that I wrote the passages quoted from the Quarterly Review; and I will not tell you whether I wrote them or not. This, we think, is not very manful; but it is sufficiently intelligible. If Mr. Southey had not written these passages, he would have told us plainly enough. We are a little chary, it may be supposed of this privilege of incognito in reviewers; and readily admit, that no one is obliged to answer impertinent questions on such a subject. Yet it is impossible to deny, that there are instances in which, we suppose with the author's consent, the fact is just as notorious as if his name had been subscribed to his article. What would Mr. Southey say, for example, if Mr. Canning or Mr. Frere were to tell him, that he had no business to know or to suspect that they had written the celebrated parodies of his republican poems in the Anti-Jacobin? The truth is, that the writers of one half of the articles in a review are impatient to be known, and take effectual measures to be so. This we take to be the case of Mr. Southey. We have understood, that he makes no secret of his having written the papers in question,—or indeed of any thing else with which he illuminates the public:-and, to be sure, though a dilettanti contributor may be a little shy of acknowledging his pieces, and desirous of the protection of his mask, it is hardly to be imagined that a professional bookmaker, when he publishes anonymously, has any desire to be really concealed; and accordingly, he and his publishers commonly take good care that the fame of his name shall suffer no long obscuration. The belief, that the Reviewer's invective against seditious writings, and the call on government to prosecute them with extraordinary rigour, were written by Mr. Southey, was universal in London, and the assertion we believe had been made, without contradiction, in various newspapers, before Mr. Smith alluded to it on the occasion we have mentioned. The report itself was ground enough for a statement that was necessarily hypothetical, and which now appears to have proceeded on a correct supposition: For there is no contradiction of the assertion yet-by Mr. Southey, or by any one for him. On the contrary, there is, in this Letter, an affectionate defence of the Reviewer, who, he says, may defy Mr. Smith to disprove any part of his statements; and, what is of more importance as to the present point, there is a distinct repetition of the Reviewer's most absurd and offensive assertions in the epistle now before us. If it were necessary to produce any further proofs of their identity, we might refer to the Reviewer's singular encomium on the ingenuity and plausibility of the project for abolishing all private property-a betise into which nothing could possibly have seduced him but the partiality of his paternal regard for every thing that had once found favour in his own eyes. Nothing that Mr. Southey ever did or said, we are perfectly persuaded, will ever appear an object of just ridicule to Mr. Southey. Though people who go but a little way in his original career of republicanism and revolution, are treated without ceremony as scoundrels, wretches, and poisoners-against whom it |