their virulence and the talent they display, have a tendency to qualify its most pernicious effects.  They have redeeming traits in them.  “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump:”  and the spirit of humanity (thanks to Mr. Southey) is not quite expelled from the Quarterly Review.  At the corner of his pen, “there hangs a vapourous drop profound” of independence and liberality, which falls upon its pages, and oozes out through the pores of the public mind.  There is a fortunate difference between writers whose hearts are naturally callous to truth, and whose understandings are hermetically sealed against all impressions but those of self-interest, and a man like Mr. Southey. Once a philanthropist and always a philanthropist.  No man can entirely baulk his nature:  it breaks out in spite of him.  In all those questions, where the spirit of contradiction does not interfere, on which he is not sore from old bruises, or sick from the extravagance of youthful intoxication, as from a last night’s debauch, our “laureate” is still bold, free, candid, open to conviction, a reformist without knowing it.  He does not advocate the slave-trade, he does not arm Mr. Malthus’s revolting ratios with his authority, he does not strain hard to deluge Ireland with blood.  On such points, where humanity has not become obnoxious, where liberty has not passed into a by-word, Mr. Southey is still liberal and humane.  The elasticity of his spirit is unbroken:  the bow recoils to its old position.  He still stands convicted of his early passion for inquiry and improvement.  He was not regularly articled as a Government-tool!—­Perhaps the most pleasing and striking of all Mr. Southey’s poems are not his triumphant taunts hurled against oppression, are not his glowing effusions to Liberty, but those in which, with a mild melancholy, he seems conscious of his own infirmities of temper, and to feel a wish to correct by thought and time the precocity and sharpness of his disposition.  May the quaint but affecting aspiration expressed in one of these be fulfilled, that as he mellows into maturer age, all such asperities may wear off, and he himself become

  “Like the high leaves upon the holly-tree!”

Mr. Southey’s prose-style can scarcely be too much praised.  It is plain, clear, pointed, familiar, perfectly modern in its texture, but with a grave and sparkling admixture of archaisms in its ornaments and occasional phraseology.  He is the best and most natural prose-writer of any poet of the day; we mean that he is far better than Lord Byron, Mr. Wordsworth, or Mr. Coleridge, for instance.  The manner is perhaps superior to the matter, that is, in his Essays and Reviews.  There is rather a want of originality and even of impetus:  but there is no want of playful or biting satire, of ingenuity, of casuistry, of