He is not teres et rotundus.  Mr. Southey walks with his chin erect through the streets of London, and with an umbrella sticking out under his arm, in the finest weather.  He has not sacrificed to the Graces, nor studied decorum.  With him every thing is projecting, starting from its place, an episode, a digression, a poetic license.  He does not move in any given orbit, but like a falling star, shoots from his sphere.  He is pragmatical, restless, unfixed, full of experiments, beginning every thing a-new, wiser than his betters, judging for himself, dictating to others.  He is decidedly revolutionary.  He may have given up the reform of the State:  but depend upon it, he has some other hobby of the same kind.  Does he not dedicate to his present Majesty that extraordinary poem on the death of his father, called The Vision of Judgment, as a specimen of what might be done in English hexameters?  In a court-poem all should be trite and on an approved model.  He might as well have presented himself at the levee in a fancy or masquerade dress.  Mr. Southey was not to try conclusions with Majesty—­still less on such an occasion.  The extreme freedoms with departed greatness, the party-petulance carried to the Throne of Grace, the unchecked indulgence of private humour, the assumption of infallibility and even of the voice of Heaven in this poem, are pointed instances of what we have said.  They shew the singular state of over-excitement of Mr. Southey’s mind, and the force of old habits of independent and unbridled thinking, which cannot be kept down even in addressing his Sovereign!  Look at Mr. Southey’s larger poems, his Kehama, his Thalaba, his Madoc, his Roderic.  Who will deny the spirit, the scope, the splendid imagery, the hurried and startling interest that pervades them?  Who will say that they are not sustained on fictions wilder than his own Glendoveer, that they are not the daring creations of a mind curbed by no law, tamed by no fear, that they are not rather like the trances than the waking dreams of genius, that they are not the very paradoxes of poetry?  All this is very well, very intelligible, and very harmless, if we regard the rank excrescences of Mr. Southey’s poetry, like the red and blue flowers in corn, as the unweeded growth of a luxuriant and wandering fancy; or if we allow the yeasty workings of an ardent spirit to ferment and boil over—­the variety, the boldness, the lively stimulus given to the mind may then atone for the violation of rules and the offences to bed-rid authority; but not if our poetic libertine sets up for a law-giver and judge, or an apprehender of vagrants in the regions either of taste or opinion.  Our motley gentleman deserves the strait-waistcoat, if he is for setting others in the stocks of servility, or condemning them to the pillory for a new mode of rhyme or reason.  Or if a composer of sacred Dramas on classic models, or a translator of an old Latin