Mr. Southey’s political system is just what we might expect from a man who regards politics, not as matter of science, but as matter of taste and feeling.  All his schemes of government have been inconsistent with themselves.  In his youth he was a republican; yet, as he tells us in his preface to these Colloquies, he was even then opposed to the Catholic Claims.  He is now a violent Ultra-Tory.  Yet, while he maintains, with vehemence approaching to ferocity, all the sterner and harsher parts of the Ultra-Tory theory of government, the baser and dirtier part of that theory disgusts him.  Exclusion, persecution, severe punishments for libellers and demagogues, proscriptions, massacres, civil war, if necessary, rather than any concession to a discontented people; these are the measures which he seems inclined to recommend.  A severe and gloomy tyranny, crushing opposition, silencing remonstrance, drilling the minds of the people into unreasoning obedience, has in it something of grandeur which delights his imagination.  But there is nothing fine in the shabby tricks and jobs of office; and Mr. Southey, accordingly, has no toleration for them.  When a Jacobin, he did not perceive that his system led logically, and would have led practically, to the removal of religious distinctions.  He now commits a similar error.  He renounces the abject and paltry part of the creed of his party, without perceiving that it is also an essential part of that creed.  He would have tyranny and purity together; though the most superficial observation might have shown him that there can be no tyranny without corruption.

It is high time, however, that we should proceed to the consideration of the work which is our more immediate subject, and which, indeed, illustrates in almost every page our general remarks on Mr. Southey’s writings.  In the preface, we are informed that the author, notwithstanding some statements to the contrary, was always opposed to the Catholic Claims.  We fully believe this; both because we are sure that Mr. Southey is incapable of publishing a deliberate falsehood, and because his assertion is in itself probable.  We should have expected that, even in his wildest paroxysms of democratic enthusiasm, Mr. Southey would have felt no wish to see a simple remedy applied to a great practical evil.  We should have expected that the only measure which all the great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each other in supporting would be the only measure which Mr. Southey would have agreed with himself in opposing.  He has passed from one extreme of political opinion to another, as Satan in Milton went round the globe, contriving constantly to “ride with darkness.”  Wherever the thickest shadow of the night may at any moment chance to fall, there is Mr. Southey.  It is not every body who could have so dexterously avoided blundering on the daylight in the course of a journey to the antipodes.

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