hopes of earnest youth had given impulse, drove him, as it drove Wordsworth, into dread of everything that sought with passionate energy immediate change of evil into good.  But in his own way no man ever strove more patiently than Southey to make evil good; and in his own home and his own life he gave good reason to one to whom he was as a father, and who knew his daily thoughts and deeds, to speak of him as “upon the whole the best man I have ever known.”

In the days when this book was written, Southey lived at Greta Hall, by Keswick, and had gathered a large library about him.  He was Poet Laureate.  He had a pension from the Civil List, worth less than 200 pounds a year, and he was living at peace upon a little income enlarged by his yearly earnings as a writer.  In 1818 his whole private fortune was 400 pounds in consols.  In 1821 he had added to that some savings, and gave all to a ruined friend who had been good to him in former years.  Yet in those days he refused an offer of 2,000 pounds a year to come to London and write for the Times.  He was happiest in his home by Skiddaw, with his books about him and his wife about him.

Ten years after the publishing of these Colloquies, Southey’s wife, who had been, as Southey said, “for forty years the life of his life,” had to be placed in a lunatic asylum.  She returned to him to die, and then his gentleness became still gentler as his own mind failed.  He died in 1843.  Three years before his death his friend Wordsworth visited him at Keswick, and was not recognised.  But when Southey was told who it was, “then,” Wordsworth wrote, “his eyes flashed for a moment with their former brightness, but he sank into the state in which I had found him, patting with both his hands his books affectionately, like a child.”

Sir Thomas More, whose ghost communicates with Robert Southey, was born in 1478, and at the age of fifty-seven was beheaded for fidelity to conscience, on the 6th of July, 1535.  He was, like Southey, a man of purest character, and in 1516, when his age was thirty-eight, there was published at Louvain his “Utopia,” which sketched wittily an ideal commonwealth that was based on practical and earnest thought upon what constitutes a state, and in what direction to look for amendment of ills.  More also withdrew from his most advanced post of opinion.  When he wrote “Utopia” he advocated absolute freedom of opinion in matters of religion; in after years he believed it necessary to enforce conformity.  King Henry VIII., stiff in his own opinions, had always believed that; and because More would not say that he was of one mind with him in the matter of the divorce of Katherine he sent him to the scaffold.

H. M.

COLLOQUY I.—­THE INTRODUCTION.

“Posso aver certezza, e non paura,
Che raccontando quel che m’ e accaduto,
Il ver diro, ne mi sara creduto.” 
“Orlando Innamorato,” c. 5. st. 53.