“When Adam delved, and Eve span,
      Where was then the gentleman?”

(—­or the poet laureat either, we may ask?)—­In Mr. Coleridge’s Ode to an Ass’s Foal, in his Lines to Sarah, his Religious Musings; and in his and Mr. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, passim.

Of Mr. Southey’s larger epics, I have but a faint recollection at this distance of time, but all that I remember of them is mechanical and extravagant, heavy and superficial.  His affected, disjointed style is well imitated in the Rejected Addresses.  The difference between him and Sir Richard Blackmore seems to be, that the one is heavy and the other light, the one solemn and the other pragmatical, the one phlegmatic and the other flippant; and that there is no Gay in the present time to give a Catalogue Raisonne of the performances of the living undertaker of epics.  Kehama is a loose sprawling figure, such as we see cut out of wood or paper, and pulled or jerked with wire or thread, to make sudden and surprising motions, without meaning, grace, or nature in them.  By far the best of his works are some of his shorter personal compositions, in which there is an ironical mixture of the quaint and serious, such as his lines on a picture of Gaspar Poussin, the fine tale of Gualberto, his Description of a Pig, and the Holly-tree, which is an affecting, beautiful, and modest retrospect on his own character.  May the aspiration with which it concludes be fulfilled! [11]—­But the little he has done of true and sterling excellence, is overloaded by the quantity of indifferent matter which he turns out every year, “prosing or versing,” with equally mechanical and irresistible facility.  His Essays, or political and moral disquisitions, are not so full of original matter as Montaigne’s.  They are second or third rate compositions in that class.

___
[11]
“O reader! hast thou ever stood to see
The Holly Tree? 
The eye that contemplates it well perceives
Its glossy leaves,
Ordered by an intelligence so wise
As might confound the Atheist’s sophistries.

Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen
Wrinkled and keen;
No grazing cattle through their prickly round
Can reach to wound;
But as they grow where nothing is to fear,
Smooth and unarm’d the pointless leaves appear.

I love to view these things with curious eyes,
And moralize;
And in the wisdom of the Holly Tree
Can emblems see
Wherewith perchance to make a pleasant rhyme,
Such as may profit in the after time.

So, though abroad perchance I might appear
Harsh and austere,
To those who on my leisure would intrude
Reserved and rude,
Gentle at home amid my friends I’d be,
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree.

And should my youth, as youth is apt I know,
Some harshness show,
All vain asperities I day by day
Would wear away,
Till the smooth temper of my age should be
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree.