distinction between right and wrong; the indulgence of vanity, of caprice, or prejudice is regulated by the convenience or bias of the moment.  The temperament of our politician’s mind is poetical, not philosophical.  He is more the creature of impulse, than he is of reflection.  He invents the unreal, he embellishes the false with the glosses of fancy, but pays little attention to “the words of truth and soberness.”  His impressions are accidental, immediate, personal, instead of being permanent and universal.  Of all mortals he is surely the most impatient of contradiction, even when he has completely turned the tables on himself.  Is not this very inconsistency the reason?  Is he not tenacious of his opinions, in proportion as they are brittle and hastily formed?  Is he not jealous of the grounds of his belief, because he fears they will not bear inspection, or is conscious he has shifted them?  Does he not confine others to the strict line of orthodoxy, because he has himself taken every liberty?  Is he not afraid to look to the right or the left, lest he should see the ghosts of his former extravagances staring him in the face?  Does he not refuse to tolerate the smallest shade of difference in others, because he feels that he wants the utmost latitude of construction for differing so widely from himself?  Is he not captious, dogmatical, petulant in delivering his sentiments, according as he has been inconsistent, rash, and fanciful in adopting them?  He maintains that there can be no possible ground for differing from him, because he looks only at his own side of the question!  He sets up his own favourite notions as the standard of reason and honesty, because he has changed from one extreme to another!  He treats his opponents with contempt, because he is himself afraid of meeting with disrespect!  He says that “a Reformer is a worse character than a house-breaker,” in order to stifle the recollection that he himself once was one!

We must say that “we relish Mr. Southey more in the Reformer” than in his lately acquired, but by no means natural or becoming character of poet-laureat and courtier.  He may rest assured that a garland of wild flowers suits him better than the laureat-wreath:  that his pastoral odes and popular inscriptions were far more adapted to his genius than his presentation-poems.  He is nothing akin to birth-day suits and drawing-room fopperies.  “He is nothing, if not fantastical.”  In his figure, in his movements, in his sentiments, he is sharp and angular, quaint and eccentric.  Mr. Southey is not of the court, courtly.  Every thing of him and about him is from the people.  He is not classical, he is not legitimate.  He is not a man cast in the mould of other men’s opinions:  he is not shaped on any model:  he bows to no authority:  he yields only to his own wayward peculiarities.  He is wild, irregular, singular, extreme.  He is no formalist, not he!  All is crude and chaotic, self-opinionated, vain.  He wants proportion, keeping, system, standard rules.